Monday 15 August: New housing must be built to catch rainwater to top up mains supplies

Posted on by Geoff Graham

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717 thoughts on “Monday 15 August: New housing must be built to catch rainwater to top up mains supplies”

  3. ‘Morning, Peeps.  Thank goodness yesterday’s sweaty and stifling weather gave way in early evening to something fresher.  We had a pleasant supper with friends in the garden as the temperature fell and something resembling comfortable weather finally returned. And long may it continue!

    Today’s DT contains the following item:

    Thomas Hardy’s ‘cruel’ novel given a trigger warning

    University of Warwick accused of treating students like ‘a patient who needs constant care and supervision’ through use of cautionary notes

    No, I’m not making this up!  Naturally I made straight for the BTL comments and I wasn’t disappointed.  There is, as most Nottlrs would expect, complete unanimity as to the pathetic state of those at Warwick University.  I, too, studied Far From The Madding Crowd for ‘O’ Level English Lit and thoroughly enjoyed it.  I saw the 1967 film of the book (in my view significantly better than the 2015 version) and, far from suffering huge psychological damage, I was mightily impressed by it.

    Just a small sample of the BTL posts:

    Roy Garner7  HRS AGO

    If students are so immature they need nannying, they shouldn’t have university places.

    At their age I was serving in the RAF during the Cuba missile crisis; I don’t recall senior officers coming around checking our nappies were clean.

    Pander to immaturity and that’s what you get.

    H Mason 6 HRS AGO

    Incredible! I read Lord of the Flies at school in 1974 at the age of 12…to this day I still remember the description of Piggy’s brains spilling over the rocks.. 1977 O level English was The Mayor of of Casterbridge , A level English included Dombey and Son, Tess of the

    d’Urbervilles, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, King Lear.. no trigger warnings..and in those days we were given the books at beginning of summer holidays and expected to have them all by September… university students don’t know they born…

    Kimball Scott 7 HRS AGO

    I read Far from the Madding Crowd for O level. It made me fall in love with Hardy’s Wessex. Hardy is one our best novelists. Go to Dorset and see how wonderfully accurate his landscape descriptions are. He is being historically accurate concerning farming and rural life. This generation coming to adulthood are being treated like a bunch of namby pamby children. By issuing warnings you do not let them decide on the content of a novel.

    We will be burning books next.

    Bill Ma 7 HRS AGO

    Trigger warnings are merely the precursor to removing, eliminating, burning. This is how it starts and there will be no end until every non conforming text is sent down the memory hole to be replaced by approved literature, thought, behaviour. Another one to add to Truss’s great Tory reset.

    Barry Stokes 7 HRS AGO

    Good grief, at this rate they’ll never get beyond Spot the Dog……! How will they ever cope with real life ?

    Pad Mac 7 HRS AGO

    Another day, another embarrassing, shameful & utterly stupid filter from left-wing, snowflake ‘academics’. There’s a surprise.

    Ian Brookes 7 HRS AGO

    Will it be long until trousers come with a warning telling the wearer to drop them before doing a number two?

    1. I was always under the impression that Universities were supposed to broaden the mind not close it off.

        1. I have. He was working as an interviewer for a radio listener survey. He is about 30 years old, and has just been cancelled by his college, and a hearings process is under way. We sat in the sunshine on the garden wall and had wee chat while he completed the questionnaire on his laptop.

    2. Surely people who will be upset will simply choose another course?
      Guilty secret; I never considered studying English Lit because I was alternatively bored and traumatised by the novels we read at school which were either too old for me or like Lord of the Flies, Day of the Triffids, The Inheritors, gave me nightmares for years. I still find LotF terrifying and disgusting to this day.

      1. I’d read everything in the house by the time I was eleven. The books I was given in school couldn’t compete with the terrors of obstetrics textbooks 🤣.

        I know what you mean about LotF, though.

        1. My sister was raiding the grown ups section of the library when she was ten.
          I was still reading Biggles and Enid Blyton when I was fifteen.
          I read a lot of classics in my thirties and forties, when I was old enough to understand and enjoy them. But nothing scary. Real life is bad enough.

          1. Some of the books set for us to read for O Levels etc were in the adult library (over 14 years of age), but the librarian was happy to let me borrow them.

        2. I was much the same. In Primary 7 I was aged eleven. Teacher asked us to write about a book that we had read. I did a precis of “Jungle Green”, a paperback about National Servicemen fighting in the Malayan Emergency. I am afraid that some of my quotes shocked the dear lady.

      2. Well it showed how civilisation is only skin deep – but I can’t say it traumatised me at 15.

        1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708640/characters/nm0001734

          Quark : Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people… will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don’t believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes.

          Star Trek Deep Space 9 understood this. Nowadays such facts would require a ‘trigger warning’ for the weak minded Left wing child.

        2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708640/characters/nm0001734

          Quark : Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people… will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don’t believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes.

          Star Trek Deep Space 9 understood this. Nowadays such facts would require a ‘trigger warning’ for the weak minded Left wing child.

    4. How will they cope with real life? They don’t. The weak vanish into the Civil service or other irrelevant non-job in a state funded charity and spend their entire lives trapped between irrelevance and victimhood, keeping their job through the eagerness of legal threats over ‘isms’ rather than succeeding and achieving on merit – because they have none.

    5. I added this but had to use Judy’s login

      judith ewing 10 HRS AGO

      Oh, the poor little snowflakes might not like the harsh realities of rural life as it was. Hurry to your safe space and suck your thumb until you feel better.

  5. New housing must be built to catch rainwater to top up mains supplies

    Most house have soakaways, isn’t that the same thing?

    It all goes into the water cycle.

      1. They’re taught it, but under the banner of climate change, so all truth is washed out.

    2. Most new houses don’t have soakaways. Water from the roof goes into the surface drains or sewers.

  7. The heatwave seems good for losing weight.

    Not sure how we get so many fat people in hot climates

  8. Dog stretchered down Ben Nevis after refusing to walk any further. 15 August 2022.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/38647db6907b846037f20b89fc5909999fda56261e9b8ff9b1e80a2f43bac31c.jpg

    A mountain rescue team has been called up to Britain’s highest mountain to save a dog that refused to go any further.
    Maggie, a 35kg Turkish Akbash dog, was unable to continue the descent from Ben Nevis with her owners because her paws were in pain.

    The three women walking with the dog had tried carrying her down the 4,413ft mountain but were forced to admit defeat around the halfway mark.

    Dogs like humans have their physical limitations and her owners should have known this! It’s a long (and boring) walk. I climbed it when I was at the peak of my powers and still found that it required something of an effort.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/14/dog-stretchered-ben-nevis-refusing-walk/?li_source=LI&li_medium=liftigniter-rhr

      1. Although they do struggle to walk with pad protectors on – and remember dogs sweat through their paw pads, so covering them can be difficult for the dog.

    2. Just been reading that. The stupid bints’ collective IQ doesn’t match that of the dog.
      Good BTL comment:

      I saw the other day “If you’re thinking of taking your dog out today – you must go barefoot and wear a long fur coat””

  9. There is a very detailed article in the DT about our lack of energy independence in general and, more specifically our woeful lack of gas storage:

    Inside the ‘crazy’ decisions that left Britain with no gas storage and vulnerable to Putin

    A decade of ministerial failures and Whitehall complacency has squandered efforts to improve energy resilience

    It’s a very lengthy piece and I have not copied it  – and the fact that it has a number of graphs and so on that my device seems reluctant to reproduce.  However, it is well worth a read and it can be found at:
     https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/08/14/inside-crazy-decisions-left-britain-no-gas-storage-vulnerable/

    It has attracted around 1,430 BTL posts so far and here is just one which, for me, says it all:

    Stuart Seymour 19 HRS AGO

    The UK energy strategy is pathetic as the green agenda moves us to an electricity only UK.

    The UK needs diversified energy & generating technologies and control of supply

    Truss/Sunak: action today please:

    1. Repeal Climate Change Act

    2. Fast track Shell’s Jackdaw gas and Cambo oil fields & Rough gas storage

    3. Strongly motivate oil companies to explore for oil & gas in Britain’s seas (no windfall taxes)

    4. Objectively assess fracking gas and if OK, implement immediately (currently too many emotional views)

    5. Do not close last 2 coal fired power stations; West Burton (2022) & Radcliffe on Soar (2024)

    6. Look at re-starting the 2 mothballed gas fired stations, Severn Power, South Wales & Sutton Bridge, Lincolnshire

    7. Approve Cumbria & Newcastle coal mines (Germany mines coal)

    8. Convert Drax back to coal and stop kidding ourselves burning wood is green – £600pa subsidy

    9. Review practicalities of updating the UK designed Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (eg existing Hartlepool & Heysham) and/or Pressurised Water Reactor (Sizewell). Operating successfully for 30 years and proven. Might only take 6-7 years to build compared to Hinkley Point C, which I understand is 10+ years and has technical issues

    10. Continue RR mini nuclear, recognising this will take 10 years.

    11. Stop subsidising green, eg wind, solar, wood/biomass, cars, chargers, heat pumps

    12. Stop further wind and solar. We are very vulnerable to wind blowing and the sun, and solar uses farming land which we need for food

    Overall, the Government must stop dreaming about a fantasy green agenda

    …and by the way, stop the unjustified rush to scrap petrol/diesel cars and gas home boilers – and please prove that man-made CO2 is a problem.

    * * *

    That is quite a shopping list, and the chances of seeing any of them effected is pretty remote, given the shocking level of governmental incompetence that is so prevalent these days.

      1. 355117+ up ticks,

        Morning JN,

        Then who puts them into power, the coalition that is, time after time after time, then some. ?

    2. Morning, Hugh J and all Nottlers. Cooler and cloudy at the moment in N Essex.

      I have severe doubts that the government is being/has been incompetent around the energy issue. IMHO what has been going on is a planned assault on our living standards and quality of life. Now we have a similar assault on our food supplies, including government adverts requesting that farmers look to retiring earlier, cattle exhaust fumes are a threat to warming the Planet, reductions in eating meat etc.
      If there is incompetence within the energy, and now the food supply chain, it’s lodged within the ‘thick as mince’ voting fodder that dominates the back benches: unthinking, unquestioning party apparatchiks selected for those very shortcomings. Don’t rock the boat or the party may suffer dominates what passes for their thinking.

    3. Fishi and Untrussworthy would not have the slightest idea what Mr Seymour is on about.

      1. They do, but will immediately say ‘no, not doing that, or ‘that’s too difficult, I’ve an election to win’. As that’s their focus, not the public.

    4. As they’re all obsessed with climate change I can only think that the upper cabinet secretaries and ministers are simply bribed – with tax payers money, of course – to continue to promote it. It’s not real any more than any religion. The entire precis is based on deceit and fiddling the figures to get the answer the state wants.

      The solution is as above, but such will never come to pass. The Left wing state is being paid to regurgitate this drivel. Idiots who are too young and naive continue to push ‘green is good’ agenda, never thinking about what it all actually means. Some twonk working in an aerial photography department demanded to know how we were offsetting the ‘carbon’ from the aircraft’s engines. I suggested she be sacked. She didn’t seem to understand why.

      Then there’s the shouty, obnoxious Lefties who get their vegetables delivered by a van.

      Add to this the morons demanding ever more criminal immigration and also demanding we cut back on food production, fuel and energy.

      Every single thing is going backward. All of them. We’re over taxed, over worked, we get appalling services for it, the country slides culturally backward as vicious, violent savages are brought in – forced on us by our own government.

      Everything is wrong and if not righted by radical change then as a society we will simply cease to exist into a hellhole of third world barbarism where a rich clique dictate how others will live. It’s got to stop.

  10. Morning all,

    Harvesting rainwater for drinking purposes could be a new business opportunity and it could also be tastier and more healthy than chemically treated tap water.

    Here are some of the issues:

    https://drinkheartwater.com/blog/can-you-drink-rainwater

    During my attempts at recycling water from our greenhouse roof and then pumping at pressure through plant spraying jets I had a lot of trouble with getting enough filtration to prevent jet clogging though algae growth. The main remedy waa to prevent any harvested rainwater being exposed to sunlight.But what water processing must I do to make the water more healthy and tasty than the chlorinated water than comes out the cold water main tap?

    2. ‘Morning, Angie. Some form of filtration system, to include UV treatment, is all I can think of. And the economics of such a setup may well be prohibitive.

      1. Water used to house baby salmon (elevin/fry/parr) is treated with UV radiation to kill off unwanted wee bug things in the water. So it would work to some extent, though maybe not on algae?

    3. How healthy and tasty will rainwater that comes from clouds that have been sprayed to make it rain be?

      1. My car is testament to the fine dust(?) that even the slightest light shower of rain drags out of the atmosphere.

  11. 355117+ up ticks,

    Morning Each,

    Monday 15 August: New housing must be built to catch rainwater to top up mains supplies.

    Monday 15 August: New housing must be built to catch rainwater to top up mains supplies & house the ” new potential troops / voters” entering at Dover plus, winter is fast approaching, tis alright for the indigenous to have concrete beds but to expect the illegals to accept the same is inviting
    racial unrest.

    Surely the building of new reservoirs should be front runner along with an
    indigenous town A militia /mɨˈlɪʃə/ generally refers to an army or other fighting force that is composed of non-professional fighters; citizens of a nation or subjects of a state that can be called upon to enter a combat situation, as opposed to a professional force of regular, full-time soldiers.

    1. It is always ‘we’, the public must do something. We must change. We must have more insulation. We must go without. How about the state starts meeting demand? How about it accepts it has imported 25 million useless breeders who are causing the country huge disruption?

      1. 355118+ up ticks,

        Afternoon W,
        But every time,every opportunity the electorate have had they have shown satisfaction with the close shop Coalition party.

        This is NOT new this has been ongoing for forty years with, via the polling
        booth , the peoples support.

  12. SIR – We have an expanding population, yet the last reservoir built in this country was in 1991. We are an island, yet the one desalination plant has been closed down. Why?

    We are short of gas, so why are we not fracking, and why are North Sea operations not expanding?

    In South Africa during the oil embargo they produced 1.5 million barrels of synthetic fuel from 800 million tons of coal. We have vast coal reserves. What is going on?

    Dr Peter D Moug
    Worthing, West Sussex

    Because, Dr Moug, the idiots are in charge, and their cowardice in the face of lengthy protests by the soap-dodgers and other greenie types who want this country to fail is shameful. Remember Balcombe?

    1. I think we have to accept that it is worse than stupidity; it is a fascist takeover by a billionaire elite who appear to believe that they do not need the common man any more, and who certainly don’t want us (see recent output from WEF). So cutting off our cheap energy, water and food, and mass medicating us is policy, not accident. We’re polluting their earth by our mere existence in such numbers.

      1. Yep. Yet the Left keep bringing in tens of millions of unwanted criminal welfare immigrants.

        1. 355116+ up ticks,

          W,

          The left is the lab/lib/con/ ukip coalition I take it ?

          The terminology currently surely must be RIGHT / WRONG.

    3. The EU’s policy is to force down energy usage. Our Mandarins have exactly the same attitude – mostly to ensure they can rejoin the EU on demand. The way it is doing that is by rationing it and making energy so expensive people cannot afford to use it.

      Same for water. The attitude of the communists is to restrict, control and reduce. Never to accept that our entire way of life is based on energy.

    1. Oliver is one of that growing band of MSM journalists who have been converted to Nottlerism!

    2. 355118+ up ticks,

      O2O,

      People power would surely be well advised to make him
      (Neil Oliver) Prime Minster with Batten & Braine plus of course Robinson, & similar ilk in his cabinet

      A dream team…… maybe.

    1. Oh no, how terrible – that will only make the rising sea level climate emergency worse.

  15. Jerry Sadowitz show axed over ‘extreme racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny’. 15 August 2022.

    The Pleasance, the venue which cancelled the 60-year-old’s show after members of the audience and staff complained, said on Sunday night that the content had been “extreme in its racism, sexism, homophobia and misogyny” and defended its decision.

    It argued that the “boundaries” were “always moving” and that some audience members had been made to feel “unsafe” by Sadowitz’s “completely unacceptable” actions.

    Were they dragged into this show? Shanghaied? Drugged? Abducted? Tied into their seats? I don’t think it is one that I would choose to attend myself but without any personal knowledge of the circumstances I would suppose that they were all able to stand up and walk if offended!

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/15/jerry-sadowitz-show-axed-extreme-racism-sexism-homophobia-misogyny/

    1. It sounded pretty vile and tasteless. As you say, the remedy is to walk out – something I have done in the past!

    2. Clearly they don’t value Jerry’s cultural heritage or diversity!

      Morning Minty and everyone.

    3. Sadowitz as with Frankie Boyle push the limits and sometimes go way over the top. If you don’t like that style of humour don’t buy a ticket. As the snowflakes would say….go educate yourselves.

    4. If the audience members are that weak then they are stupid. Felt unsafe. What, was there a masked assassin pootling about? No, they’re weak and childish.

    5. Weasel words”feel unsafe”. What do they even mean in this context? This claptrap needs to be challenged.

  16. Good morning all,

    Cooler morning , but it was a very hot and sticky night again .

    Yikes .. my laptop says rain .. must get moving and take the dogs for their morning gallop / my trundle .

    Moh playing golf … again

  17. Good Moaning.
    V. bad night.
    MB felled by the hot weather.
    Thank goodness we have our cleaner sorting us out today; her stories about last seven days’ sagas among her convoluted family will take his mind off things.

      1. Heat, I suspect.
        He’s been pushing himself in the garden; sorting out at both houses, and I think he’s overdone it.

    3. We must share the same cleaner ! I often say to her’ okay that’s enough, get to work’.

          2. Best not – and to treat any illness as one always did before the plague struck. We survived, didn’t we?

  19. Where NOTTL leads ……

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/14/defend-freedoms-must-honest-dangers-face/

    “To defend our freedoms, we must be honest about the dangers we face

    The attack on Sir Salman Rushdie is further evidence that we are conceding to violence and fear

    14 August 2022 • 9:30pm

    I do not believe that a man called Muhammad, born in the sixth century, was a prophet sent by God. I do not accept the instructions he said he received from the Archangel Gabriel. And I do not accept that the Sunna, or body of Islamic laws, has any relevance to me.

    I do not object to historical enquiry that examines whether thousands of angels helped Muhammad at the Battle of Badr, or whether the battle even took place. Nor to asking if he really came from Mecca, or if he lived closer to the Mediterranean, which would suggest his inspiration was worldly, not divine. Nor do I object to those who doubt Muhammed was illiterate, even though his inability to read reassures Muslims he was relaying the word of God.

    And I do not care if Muhammed is satirised, criticised or mocked. Thirty-four years after writing The Satanic Verses, Sir Salman Rushdie lies in a hospital bed following an horrific knife attack. A teacher from Batley remains in hiding after showing a depiction of Muhammad during a lesson about blasphemy. In France, Charlie Hebdo staff were murdered after publishing a cartoon of Muhammed, and schoolteacher Samuel Paty was beheaded after showing that cartoon to his students. There are countless other examples.

    Across the world there is an attempt to protect Muhammad and Islam from anything but reverence from those who were born Muslim, and fearful silence from the rest of us. On one front, there is violence: riots in the Middle East, assassinations in Pakistan, murders and terror attacks in Europe. On a second front – not formally connected to the first but aided by fear – there is a political campaign. Laws and policies to counter discrimination and “hate crime” are used to shut down free thinking. “Islamophobia” campaigners seek to criminalise criticism of their religion and protect those who act in its name.

    And they are winning. As the writer Kenan Malik says, The Satanic Verses would not be written today: the thugs whose response to Rushdie’s novel was violence lost the battle but won the war. Britain “internalised the fatwa”, in Malik’s words, and a collective decision was made by journalists, politicians and creatives to avoid Islam as best they could.

    But that is not all. Activists learned to organise and play the liberal game. Representative groups, including several accused of extremism, were founded and won privileged access to politicians and officials. Some persuaded public bodies, and Labour, to adopt an official definition of Islamophobia. In the report providing the definition, criticism of Islamism is described as a “constitutive part” of Islamophobia. “The notion of free speech”, it says, often “humiliates, marginalises and stigmatises Muslims”. Press reports about grooming gangs, in which mainly Muslim men raped vulnerable white girls, are cited as an example of such stigma.

    The largest group is the Muslim Council of Britain, which was established by Sir Iqbal Sacranie. Sir Iqbal, as then-spokesman for the UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs, personally said of Rushdie in 1989 that “death perhaps is a bit too easy for him”. The Government does not engage with the MCB because, in particular, it refuses to repudiate the Istanbul Declaration, which justified terrorism and was signed by its then deputy general secretary, Daud Abdullah. The policy of non-engagement, which began under the last Labour government, is now said by Labour to be evidence of “Tory Islamophobia”.

    So complicated are the overlapping circular arguments, theological divisions and sectarian rivalries, and webs of activists and organisations, and so removed are we from our fundamental principles of free expression and equality before the law, we are missing the obvious. While historians are free to assert that Moses did not exist, and comedians to mock Christianity – as they do mercilessly – we have a de facto blasphemy law for Islam. And that is entirely wrong: no body of beliefs should be protected from criticism or mockery.

    It is dangerous too. For we are ceding arguments, power and public spaces to bigots and extremists. After all, this battle to control thought, language and action is mostly not about those of us who never believed in Muhammad. It is about defining normative Islam in a hardline way and dictating to Muslims how they should live their lives. It is about preventing Muslims from holding moderate views about the role of women, minorities, gays and apostates, and about how to live in modern Britain.

    So what can be done? First, stop living in fear. For too long we have hidden behind a supposedly clever formula. Of course we have free speech, many say, but it is irresponsible to satirise or criticise Muhammad or Islam. Irresponsible, they mean, because some Muslims respond with violence and intimidation. But the opposite of this conceit is true. Threaten me with violence for joking about or criticising your religion, and I should feel more compelled to do it. There is no free speech when a meat cleaver is pressed against our throats. Ask Samuel Paty.

    Second, be honest. Pious defences of free speech mean nothing when we cannot admit where the danger comes from. Not all Muslims want to censor and intimidate critics, not even a majority do, but this is a battle fought in the name of Islam. We can say extremism is a perversion of a great religion if we wish, but such distinctions matter little when thugs and activists believe they have scripture – with hadiths promising that “the gates of Paradise lie in the shadow of the sword” – and God on their side.

    And finally, we must take on extremists and do more to build up sensible, moderate people. Extremist activist groups need to be driven from the public square. Incitement and public order laws need to be better enforced and strengthened. De facto blasphemy laws must be swept away.

    Immigration rules should reflect the integration – or lack of it – of existing diaspora communities. Acts of separation, like wearing the burqa, should be banned in public. And we need new programmes that get charities and government working with women and girls especially to open up closed communities.

    Once again, we are told enough is enough. But until we do these things, there will be no reason to believe we really mean it.”

      1. Correct.
        Apparently there is archaeological evidence that shews they were not the same deity.

        1. All religions come from the same route – the oldest man in the village with the longest memory dispensing knowledge to the tribe. Eventually some oik realised they could profit from gatekeeping that knowledge and lo! Religion.

    2. A start would be banning muslim dress of any sort. Of demanding English, and only English be spoken. Of banning that horrific noise they call prayer. Of enforcing the law over free speech and not tolerating their ago and arrogance. When they complain about insulting mohammed then just say ‘this is permitted in the UK. Live with it’ and should they uppity get out the batons and smack the muslims about until they get the message.

      1. When I was up Great Malvern to watch the sunset last Tuesday evening, there were several ‘slammers wearing their goat shagging outfits.

    3. It would appear it’s the Pakistanis who lead this as they are the largest of this sect in the country.

      1. A genuinely rational starting point would be to stop paying them to breed. If there’s no welfare state to loaf against – and 70%+ are entirely welfare dependent – then they’ll likely leave.

    4. It is a mistake to think that there are extremist muslims and moderate muslims. There are just muslims.

        1. Moderite or Radical, they both abhor the term ‘Raghead’ and point out it not a rag but rather a little sheet. Now it’s OK to refer to them as ‘little sheetheads’.

      2. It must be transplanted [Wiki: In January 1968, she also had a one-night extramarital affair with Christiaan Barnard, a South African doctor and pioneer in heart transplant surgery]

  21. Good morning all.
    A cloudy start, but still 14°C outside, up from 12½° when I was up at 05:00.

    The Met Office’s rain radar suggests a heavy band of rain has swept up over the South West & Wales overnight, generally missing the bulk of England.

    5. Good morning, Delboy. I’m glad you said “on the radar”. The BBC weather forecast for my area suggests the possibility of rain today, tomorrow and Wednesday. I’ll believe it when I see it, but I am rather doubtful. Hopefully my cynicism will actually make it rain!

    7. Silent lightning over Snowdonia last night, but no rain. Cooler though and cloudy today.

    8. Silent lightning over Snowdonia last night, but no rain. Cooler though and cloudy today.

    1. Good catch from Tice. Pity there isn’t a single member of the uniparty capable of calling Davey out on that one.

  24. Good morning, everyone. Off early today into town to watch PRIMA FACIE at our local cinema. The programme starts at the unusually early time of 11.20 am.

      1. No chance, Phizzee. As a child I enjoyed a small packet of sweet Butterkist. Since then, all cinema popcorn has gone American, i.e. salty, and not to my taste and cartons (at the local Odeon at least) of increasingly ginormous size. Fortunately the local Curzon – to the best of my knowledge – eschews such product and instead sells me coffee and a flapjack which I can take into the auditorium with me.

      2. I no longer go to the cinema. First because the screen is far too close and I feel sick; Secondly because cinemas have become eating places. Quite disgusting . Last time I went, bloke in front ate an orange….

        1. Wherever you look now people are stuffing their faces. I will never visit a cinema again, the last time I went I walked out – the piano player was lousy

          3. So you’re saying, Alec, (© Cathy Newman) that the last film you saw was STAR WARS (1977) and you didn’t like the disco scene? Lol.

          4. Eric Fenby used to play the piano in cinemas during the silent film era. Fenby became Delius’s unpaid amanuensis who took down his compositions for him when, through blindness, lameness and syphilis the composer could not do so himself.

            I vividly remember seeing Ken Russel’s film about the subject on TV when I was a young man:

            https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMMqkb1WKpg

          5. Thanks for that, Rastus. Ken Russell made some superb TV documentaries about composers. When he later turned his attention to films for the big screen (I believe The Music Lovers, about Tschaikovsky was the first and quite good) his films got more and more weird.

          6. Pretty downmarket cinema? Proper cinemas have Wurlitzers that arise from the floor. Just saying. Mind you things may have changed, I’ve not been in a cinema this century.

  25. Just wandered round the garden (the cool has been replaced with heat) and noted that about 50% of our extensive shrubs are dead. Also two beech trees.

    1. Life’s a beech – and then it dies. Lol. (Seriously, though, sorry for your loss, Bill.)

        1. Never, plants are more important! I actually saw several raindrops on the window a few minutes ago. They’ve evaporated. It might have been the results of a damp bird having just had a bath.

    3. My mother’s philosophy was never give up on any plant until after the spring.
      Fairly shocking that mature trees are dying though.

      1. They are 38 years old. And there are plenty left. I planted them deliberately to supply firewood in my old age. A good investment. They were 50p each sapling!

        1. Given the recent rises in firewood prices, that might have been your best performing investment!

        2. So what are you going to do for firewood in your old age if the trees have already died? :-))

          1. There are plenty left! I set 70 beech. Ten have been felled and burned. In addition to the 6 – I have about 50 oak, ash and other hardwood trees….

          5. The more the merrier. We have a huge Oak tree taking up a roundabout on entry to Romanby from the South and West. It is a beauty

          8. We have three Oaks in our garden – one was there before we came and the other two grew from seed and we carefully dug them up and transplanted them. Both of these are doing well and are in good health.

          10. We have planted several stretches of laurel hedges. If cut into logs and stored for a couple of years they are excellent in woodburning stoves.

            We have two piles – one of 50 cm logs for our large Clearview stove and the other of 40 cm logs for our smaller Woodwarm stove. Both these have airwash systems and the logs burn very clean and one gets an excellent view of the flames . With prudent coppicing these hedges will provide us with good firewood for the rest of our lives – and beyond!

            I do not much like chain saws so I saw all the logs by hand which keeps me fitter than I would otherwise be.

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/65ee372b98c3fd1ef72c1ad0aa5d875dae0b835a9f126a817ee73fbbf8a706c6.jpg
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/1ac94e7ab625140e89e715aa2c6b998a1808dd06c06ffa4eb17d6beae71312ae.jpg

    1. BTL @ DTletters

      Daisy Belle
      10 MIN AGO
      A friend of mine has business premises on the side of a canal. Water from the roof made its way into the canal and the canal authorities charged him for ‘disposing’ of his water!

      1. Early on in the privatised days, some water companies wanted to charge property owners for water that they collected from roofs.

        1. I remember that if you had water butt’s they wanted to charge for the catchment. A lot of newer homes and especially extension have soakaways on the property.
          Water that flows from new roofing and hard standing will take hundreds of years to become useful.
          Suggesting we have to build houses for water catchment, more than suggests how useless those who are currently in charge are. And once again not in anyway in control of their braincells.
          It would take about ten years of rain fall to replenish the amount of water used in building the houses and water used in materials manufacture before the water from the roofing became a cup full of recognised profit.

          1. To the simple-minded, it seems such an obvious solution to collect water in butts. However, I doubt if anyone has done any calculations on how much water could be realistically collected and be useful to the householder or business. More to the point, how many households could make use of it? After all, it’s dirty water once it’s run across the roof and not everyone has a garden or can make use of it in one, especially those whose outdoor space is small and covered in decking, paving or artificial grass.

          2. The sediment just settles with the fine particles. The out let’s are above the bottom of the tanks.
            The tanks are flushed out when needed to be.
            In the ozzie out back all farms, homes and other residential buildings are reliant on huge out door water tanks.
            There are areas where the mains tap water is a bit suspect such as near Adelaide. Bath water can be a bit colourful. It’s the bottom (no pun intended) end of the river Murray system.

          3. My bathwater on the Isle of Skye was dark brown. And before anyone casts nasturtiums that was before i got in it.

          4. We got that in Wooler in the ’60s after heavy rain washed the peat down from the moorlands round Cheviot.

  28. Duke and Duchess of Sussex to return to UK next month
    The couple will be attending ‘charity events’, according to a spokesperson, and will also visit Germany as part of the trip
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/royal-family/2022/08/15/duke-duchess-sussex-travel-uk-next-month/

    My internet connection seems to haver been sabotaged: I tried to post this under this article in today’s DT about Harry’s and Migraine’s proposed visit to the UK but it did not go up – it clearly did not follow the accepted agenda.

    The best that the Daily Telegraph can do is to ignore the visit completely and give it no publicity. This should not be impossible as most of the MSM is more than happy to ignore Pakistani rape gangs, ignore the arguments which run counter to man-made climate change, and ignore the damage that Covid jabs have done to some people’s health.

  29. The stupidity of sanctions on ourselves, allegedly targeted at Russia, has become very clear in many aspects of our everyday lives. At least there is one country not going along with it all.
    From RT:
    “Hungarian National Assembly Speaker Laszlo Kover has hammered the EU’s sanctions regime on Russia, saying it will bring economic ruin.”

  31. Morning all 😃

    Which government civil service moron surfaced from the sludge to up with this insane theory about building houses to catch water ?
    This is just another feeble attempt to try and cover up and justify more of the mistakes they make on now it seems, an hourly basis.

    2. A large development site, preferably brownfield, should have any planning permission rescinded, compulsory purchased and turned into the biggest, deepest, reservoir possible. The Asda site for a huge mosque springs to mind.

  32. Morning all. Bl..dy rain. Didn’t turn up again What do these weather forecasters get paid for, huh!

    Our grandson was 18 in 1st August last year. He received a summons for jury service, would you believe! He was able to postpone it for a year as he started university in the September so, he turned up this morning for selection, and was told the barristers are on strike this week”! Four trials meant to start today. Sent home. Got to go back tomorrow apparently.

  33. It is in fact, lightly raining here now!!! Just seen a fellow on the way to the golf course with an umbrella up!

  34. Good Morning. Damp, dull, and drizzly. The real Scotland after our 3 days of summer. The weather broke last night with thunderstorms and lightning.

    1. I was confused as to why at work, Computer keeps lying to me about the weather. Then I realised it thinks I’m in Manchester. Possibly because it’s no longer on WiFi and is plugged into a network connection. Maybe the server is in Manchester?

      1. I don’t know where mine thinks I am- it’s telling me it’s raining now; it isn’t. Computers are bonkers 90% of the time.

        2. If you operate behind a VPN (Virtual Private Network) it might think, as it is supposed to, that whatever, Country, City, Town you’ve selected is where you are.

          When in Suffolk, my VPN was set to Glasgow – now it’s London.

  35. Last week I made the point on this forum that higher education is now more about social manipulation than academic excellence. The majority of our students go to private schools and they are very far from gruntled by the fact that they now need better grades than those who go to state schools.

    And now it has spread to sport:

    Josh Bayliss: ‘It’s frustrating when people say everyone who went to private school is posh’
    Kate Rowan meets the Bath No 8 at this alma mater, Millfield, to defend English rugby’s reliance on the private schools system
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2022/08/15/josh-bayliss-frustrating-when-people-say-everyone-who-went-private/

    A BTL Comment:

    Why should it be more acceptable to be yobbish than posh!

    If we are determined to accept lower standards academically and in sport for reasons of social manipulation then we must accept the fact that we shall become more and more mediocre.

    1. As a society laziness, ignorance and idiocy have become celebrated. To be wrong – and corrected – is shameful these days and rather than accept contrition and improvement the response is abuse.

      A lack of guilt and shame have driven us backward, yet they are the greatest indicators of success.

    2. We had a chap who became an England Number 8 at my school, City of Bath Technical School. He was selected whilst still a schoolboy. His name is David Gay and he came from a rugby playing family.

          1. We spent a couple of summer holidays with each other in Cornwall in the early 70s. He sailed with me from Lymington down to St Mawes in my 22 footer, Inca, one year and another year he stayed on a camp site near St Just-in-Roseland with my sisters and nephews and nieces when I was on the boat. As well as being a magnificent athlete he was highly intelligent, generous-spirited and he had a fantastic sense of humour.

            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/4fa0548a8db67a5bf579c8996f9b5b61f60f5291557bc33617bd4f15dc7dc42a.jpg

  36. Last week I made the point her that higher education is now more about social manipulation than academic excellence. The majority of our students go to private schools and they are very far from gruntled by the fact that they now need better grades than those who go to state schools.

    And now it has spread to sport:

    Josh Bayliss: ‘It’s frustrating when people say everyone who went to private school is posh’
    Kate Rowan meets the Bath No 8 at this alma mater, Millfield, to defend English rugby’s reliance on the private schools system
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2022/08/15/josh-bayliss-frustrating-when-people-say-everyone-who-went-private/

    A BTL Comment:

    Why should it be more acceptable to be yobbish than posh!

    If we are determined to accept lower standards academically and in sport for reasons of social manipulation then we must accept the fact that we shall become more and more mediocre.

  37. I expect to be in minority of one here.

    Recently, a lady died from bowel cancer. She raised a lot of money for charity before she died. She was created a Dame. Woke William visited her at home to give her the gong. Her “book” is now being serialised in The Grimes. At her death, lots of lovies/clebs claimed her as their “bestest” friend and all turned up at her funeral..

    The lady was very good looking, had a decent and supportive husband (as far as we know) and two pretty children (whose hair was far too long). All terribly photogenic.

    I suggest that had the lady had exactly the same terminal condition but looked like Les Dawson’s mother-in-law, had a wastrel unemployed husband and two guttersnipe children, she would have left this world completely unknown.

    Just saying.

    1. I don’t know. Such decency can’t be hidden and tends to come out regardless of what you look like. Look at Les Dawson. Find a picture of him smiling or laughing and he transforms. Someone invested enough to raise monies for a cause tend to be better people.

    2. I don’t know anything about that person but it’s sad she died so young. It is not a kind disease though; both my mother and brother died from it. Both also too young- mother 59 and brother 56.

      2. An aunt had the same difficult end when she was in her 50s. It was tragic watching her in the last few months and knowing nothing could be done.

        2. Though it was a celeb circus it did raise the profile of this disease and others have benefited from that.

    4. No, you’re not in a minority of one. I first heard about her when Dan Wootton began prattling on as if she were a household name on a par with Mother Teresa and about to be beatified. Until she died, I was completely unaware of her existence. She was doubtless a very good person but there are many other equally good people who don’t receive the same adulation.

    6. She’s this year’s media Captain Tom.
      I’m sorry for her and for her family, but these ghastly fake media campaigns turn my stomach.

    7. Not being one who watches UK television, I was unaware if her existence before seeing the loving coverage. So photogenic, all that was missing to make it perfect was a black husband, a lesbian tranny friend and several ukranian refugee orphans.

  40. Picked up on the Tw@ter thread this came from earlier and I see Grahame Linehan has posted part of the transcript of the audio.
    Bloody horrifying. Note that the PCSO involved was a fully signed up member of the Trans Delusion and was objecting to a simple poster the woman had on her door.

    A visit from the religious police
    The UK’s police force is institutionally misogynist

    Graham Linehan
    47 min ago

    TRANSCRIPT.

    BELLA DOE: You’re told you’re transphobic if you don’t… If you’re a lesbian and you don’t include trans women.

    PCSO: What? Why would you not include trans women?

    BD: Um. Because they’re men.

    PCSO: No they’re not.

    BD: But they can’t… they can’t change… then you’d have to…

    PCSO: Okay, where you are in your thinking is very much needed a lot of enlightenment and reading. I find that very offensive and I’d like you to take it off.

    BD: But why do you find it …why do you find it offensive?

    PCSO: Because you’re…trying to…tell people in the real world…not inside your house…outside…that trans people don’t exist. That it’s an idea, it’s ideology. And that’s it’s being harmful for women, which it isn’t. And it’s not a point of view, that’s fact. So I think that is quite damaging because what you’re actually doing is trying to give other people the idea of what you believe. Which, I think, you need to do a lot more reading on…personally.

    And now because somebody’s spoken to you about it you’re going to keep it there because you feel that that’s your right to do so.

    BD: No. I don’t…I want to…no. But it’s been…it’s faded, it’s been there for so… it’s been there. You’re. This. So now I’m…I have…I cannot ex…

    PCSO: You can express your views in your own world. This is not inside your world, is it? Anybody that comes to your door is going to see that.

    BD: I don’t… Why… I thought… I said I’d keep myself to myself. This is ridiculous.

    PCSO: It’s really upset you?

    BD: Yes it has. So…

    PCSO: But you don’t think about the fact that…

    BD: I do. I think about…

    PCSO: It upsets all the trans people to say that they’re erasing women. Which it simply isn’t true.

    BD: But that… doesn’t that… If I go to a support group about rape… if I’ve been raped, right?

    PCSO: Yeah.

    BD: And I go to the support group.

    PCSO: Yeah.

    BD: I have to include trans men in that, why?

    PCSO: What do you mean you have to include trans men in it?

    BD: I mean trans women. Trans women…because…

    PCSO: You don’t think trans women get raped? You don’t think trans women don’t get raped? Trans women get raped too. Trans women are women get raped. Men get raped. Trans men get raped. There’s no differentiation and nor should there be.

    BD: I’m not talking about the sex…those who have had their um… (Silence for a few seconds)

    PCSO: It’s difficult if you’ve had an experience that has coloured your gen… your..your..your idea of what’s going on what’s going on in life. However, that sort of thing is just preying on your fears, making you scared of something you shouldn’t be scared of.

    BD: (sobs) I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t scared until I was told that it might cause offense. Now, I feel…

    PCSO: No but you’re…no, I’m not on about that. I’m on about the fact that you’re living in fear of trans women.

    BD: No I’m not. I’m not in fear…I’m not in fear. I just want to be able…I want to be able to…oh..

    PCSO: What do you want to be able to do?

    BD: I want to be able to go to my support group for my stuff that has happened to me from men without having men there, and then you’re telling me that..

    PCSO: Ah, right, yeah, so this is what I’m saying about you’ve got…you’ve got in your head that a trans woman is not a woman.

    BD: But they’re not how are they a woman (inaudible) what are women?

    PCSO: Okay. That’s not my job to educate you, but you need to educate yourself. There’s plenty… If you go on the Internet there’s tons of support groups that will help you with this.

    BD: But you’re telling me that I have to change… I have to change my belief.

    PCSO: Oh, it’s not beliefs, it’s not beliefs it’s fact. It’s not a belief system, it’s not like “do you believe in God?” you know something you can’t see. It’s not… that’s not..that’s not what this is. Again you… you’ve got to try..

    BD: You can’t change sex. It’s impossible to change sex.

    PCSO: It’s not change. Okay, it’s how you’re born. It’s how you’re born. Now if a person is born in the wrong body and spends big portion of their life in that wrong body and suffers terribly from all sorts of disorders because they have been born into the wrong body…to allow them to transition to the right body to enable them to feel… be the person that they are, isn’t something that doesn’t exist. It isn’t a choice, just the same as being gay isn’t a choice. Do you understand that being gay is not a choice, yeah?

    BD: That’s what I’m saying about les, about being lesb..

    PCSO: Yeah, so being gay is not a choice. Being trans is not a choice. It’s not a choice. It’s not something you just wake up one day & decide to be. It’s not a choice. It causes distress. It causes suicide. It causes people terrible mental health crises & mental ill health for many many years until they find the courage to be the person that they actually are. It’s not that they want to be. It’s not that they wish to be. It’s that they actually are. Does that make sense? (Silence) Does that make sense?

    BD: No.

    PCSO: It doesn’t make sense. Okay. (inaudible)

    DAUGHTER1: Don’t get upset. It’s a sticker, mum. It’s a sticker.

    BD: But my…my…I’m offending trans women who are women.

    D1: So if I had a sticker about something else, a poem or something else and so I was…and someone else has complained about it why should I remove that sticker?

    PCSO: Because it’s offensive.

    D1: How is it offensive?

    DAUGHTER2: Well they shouldn’t look at it then.

    D1: It’s like me putting lesbians…if I was to put lesbians don’t have a penis.. penises. Am I offending… Who am I offending?

    PCSO: That’s… you again… you’re going away from the point. The point..

    D1: How is it offensive?

    D2: You shouldn’t look at it.

    PCSO: Because it’s stating that trans peo… trans women are an idea not a..not a…and they don’t exist.

    PCSO: Which is what your your… is it your mum?

    D1: Yeah. It is my mum.

    PCSO: It’s what your mum’s saying.

    D1: Can’t believe all this about a sticker.

    D2: They shouldn’t look at it then.

    D1: Well…

    PCSO: If you read something on there that was racist, you would understand why I was coming to say you shouldn’t have that on your door, wouldn’t you?

    BD: Completely different. Completely different.

    PCSO: How is it different?

    BD: Completely different.

    PCSO: How is it different?

    BD: Because people are born black. Like, people are born their sex, male and female.

    PCSO: No, that’s not… Again, you’re missing the point. All I can urge you to do is just to… just read… just educate yourself.

    BD: I have. I have. I have. I have.

    D1: Educate?

    BD: Oh no. Sorry, I’m not… I’m not educated… I’m not being educated on being a man being told he’s a woman. A man is not a woman, he never will be, he’s a man.

    PCSO: Hang on a sec.

    BD: No, I’m not.

    PCSO: So, nobody’s being told anything. This is what I’m saying… that that’s where there’s a big big gap in understanding here. There’s a huge gap in understanding.

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/05f6b3389ca988c8a035946b00bdc638592c212d293437a869a6ea19097c3f14.jpg

  42. Has any one else experienced experienced this in hospitals with long term terminally I’ll patients. The patient had been in hospital for a couple of weeks. No sign of improvement. The family visit the bed side. After a couple of hours the family leaves. Not long after the family arrive home there’s a phone call saying the patient had suffered deterioration. The family rush back to the bedside and the patient has passed away.
    Another alternative that happen to my wife and I a few years ago. Here mother was terminally ill, we went to visit she was only just conscious. After half an hour the two of the staff came in and asked us to leave while they made her more comfortable. Not long after we went back to sit with her she passed away.
    I was extremely suspicious, but at all surprised.

        1. You have only to look at the example of the boy who committed suicide , which was not accepted by the mother, to see why. Some people are not capable of handling the strain.

    2. My mother had been ill for several months but the only diagnosis she had was a hiatus hernia. She couldn’t keep any food down and was in quite a lot of pain. Eventually I got a locum doctor out on a Sunday and he said he would get her into hospital for tests. She went in the next day but they didn’t help her to eat any food or give her pain relief.

      She came out a week later, but by then she was dead. They did a post mortem and she had cancer of the pancreas.

    3. Alf’s sister, blind, deaf and immobile, was in hospital following anaemia diagnosis and had a blood transfusion. She then contracted a urinary infection and the home where she had been said they couldn’t look after her any longer and suggested a Bernard Sunley home, really for life end care. She had told Alf that she really didn’t want to live much longer once she couldn’t get herself up and use her Zimmer frame. In the B S home she started refusing all her medication and also stopped eating. She really made the conscious choice to just stop living. They phoned us and we went in to say goodbye to her and then she died not long after we came away. We literally said goodbye to her and told her we loved her and held her hand. I think it was what people call a “good” death. She was comfortable and well looked after.

    4. My mother in law had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was slowly going downhill when she was diagnosed with covid. She already had been prescribed morphine in case she needed pain relief. A small voice in the back of my mind did whisper a question about events being speeded up.

      Same with my mother. She was in a hospice, we had flown over to see her and the family were all there in time to get the overnight phone call.

    5. We have seen many people hang on until the persons they really wanted to see and have final communication had visited. Then the patients switch off.
      The first experience I had of that was my father-in-law, but subsequently, MB and I have have witnessed that phenomenon time out of number.

  44. Afternoon All
    I note some earlier comment about “Lord of the Flies”
    Chatting with my older sister recently she revealed that when we visited her at college many moons ago she told her friends I was the child actor that played “Piggy”
    The worst of it was her friends believed her………
    Some times of my childhood were a little traumatic until rugby came to the rescue…..
    (I have now laffed and forgiven her)

    2. It is a great and troubling book and shows just how thin the layer of civilisation actually is.

      1. Or it shows that the author had a vile imagination, and was in tune with the thinking of his day, that everything good counts for nothing and must be destroyed because we humans are evil.

  45. CABINET OFFICE TO FINALLY VET CIVIL SERVICE EXTERNAL SPEAKERS… FOLLOWING GUIDO’S CAMPAIGN

    Last night the Financial Times revealed the Cabinet Office is introducing new rules this week, under Jacob Rees-Mogg’s instruction, to vet the social media profiles of all the department’s guest speakers for posts showing “a strong political partiality”, or any “potentially problematic or controversial material that may contravene civil service values”. In other words, checking if they’re about to invite a communist onstage for an hour-long lecture to an entire governmental department. Finally…

    Guido’s claiming this as our own policy victory. When Civil Servants aren’t learning about the healing properties of crystals, they’re taking lectures from Green Socialists, hard-left academics, and Boris-hating Guardianistas – all with obvious political agendas they’re more than happy to spread throughout Whitehall. How “racist” Boris is, how evil and damaging the Rwanda policy will be, how important it is to attend “white awareness” courses, you name it…

    Labour are already spinning this as a product of “cancel culture”. It isn’t. It’s common sense to bring in people who seek to aid, not hinder the government in advancing policy goals. Why have people who want to thwart government policy brought in to advise the Civil Service? Their job is to implement the elected government’s agenda, not slap each other on the back for hating Priti Patel. This doesn’t mean policy wonks who aren’t bound by collective responsibility should be barred from speaking, it just means mandarins think twice before inviting a witch into the Cabinet Office…

    https://order-order.com/2022/08/15/cabinet-office-to-finally-vet-civil-service-external-speakers-following-guidos-campaign/

  46. CABINET OFFICE TO FINALLY VET CIVIL SERVICE EXTERNAL SPEAKERS… FOLLOWING GUIDO’S CAMPAIGN

    Last night the Financial Times revealed the Cabinet Office is introducing new rules this week, under Jacob Rees-Mogg’s instruction, to vet the social media profiles of all the department’s guest speakers for posts showing “a strong political partiality”, or any “potentially problematic or controversial material that may contravene civil service values”. In other words, checking if they’re about to invite a communist onstage for an hour-long lecture to an entire governmental department. Finally…

    Guido’s claiming this as our own policy victory. When Civil Servants aren’t learning about the healing properties of crystals, they’re taking lectures from Green Socialists, hard-left academics, and Boris-hating Guardianistas – all with obvious political agendas they’re more than happy to spread throughout Whitehall. How “racist” Boris is, how evil and damaging the Rwanda policy will be, how important it is to attend “white awareness” courses, you name it…

    Labour are already spinning this as a product of “cancel culture”. It isn’t. It’s common sense to bring in people who seek to aid, not hinder the government in advancing policy goals. Why have people who want to thwart government policy brought in to advise the Civil Service? Their job is to implement the elected government’s agenda, not slap each other on the back for hating Priti Patel. This doesn’t mean policy wonks who aren’t bound by collective responsibility should be barred from speaking, it just means mandarins think twice before inviting a witch into the Cabinet Office…

    https://order-order.com/2022/08/15/cabinet-office-to-finally-vet-civil-service-external-speakers-following-guidos-campaign/

  47. Cats and Dogs

    https://i.imgflip.com/6pxo6x.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/73a31a66c331485fa3fc3cb3c89328c055d5557a1bb7b3dde47c944e046cf80f.jpg

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/00e3b2c4d209ae7c35bc737fdc6f3590bc420de24a531faf7ab97f1a69eab2f7.png

    https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/64f919a6c19ac77f6106caf41e2f9936ce4d387efdccb1cce0df8e2631124762.jpg

    https://cattime.com/assets/uploads/gallery/25-funny-cat-memes/funny-cat-meme.jpg

    https://thumbor.bigedition.com/funny-relationship-cat-meme/3BOqIW6sK1_iwAVkOunsTyBBVis=/800×0/filters:quality(80)/granite-web-prod/0a/e7/0ae714e8499849b28ae562d044a395a1.jpeg

    2. Why don’t these morons do something useful instead of trying to make butter from mushed up insects?

    5. Making “butter” from insects is not much different from how they produce “vegetable” oil from seeds and chemicals.
      ALL Frankenstein processes for making “food” are injurious to health.

      1. Good afternoon.

        We have solved your seed problem. This morning the MR bought a packet of Cobra seeds. Next week we are going to France and – if you give me your full postal address – we will post it from within the EUSSR and so the Swedish gestapo will not be involved.

        Over to you.

        1. Wow, Billy! I don’t know what to say. Many thanks to your lovely MR and to yourself, you are very kind.
          My address is:
          A. G. Barstow
          Lantmannavägen 73
          273 95 Onslunda
          Sweden.
          I am quite touched (Yep, you already knew that! 😉) I shall have to find a way to reciprocate your kindness.
          Thanks.

          1. Money always goes down well…!

            Will post at the end of next week (we arrive 26th) or beginning of week after. Just e-mail me when it arrives. Address will be in envelope.

    2. Missed us as well .. walked my dogs early, came home put the finished washing on the line to dry .

      My sister rang me from N Yorks telling me all about her glorious 12th August experience , and the subsequent shoot dinner of fresh grouse , and her Norfolk trip, York trip and her morning in a shooting butt.. etc etc .

      My phone battery was fading fast , and as I looked out of the window , and smelt the petrichor wafting through the patio window .. 5 minutes of rain ..
      that was all.

      Younger sister will be flying back to South Africa tomorrow , 7c in Capetown and snow high up in the mountains ..

      Where has it rained today Nottlers , not here , and that is for sure .

        1. There are some people who show up on NoTTLer every ruddy morning with fresh grouses (not naming names) {:^}}

        2. Like any game bird it should hang until it drops off the neck and then, having been plucked and eviscerated, it should just fly through the kitchen. Over-cooking is the death of flavour.

          1. Mother did that some decades ago.
            The stink was appalling.
            In Norway, you are supposed to hang game for “40 day-degrees”, so 10 days at 4C, 4 dats at 10C.
            Not tried it with birds, but it works for moose, deer and pigs.

      3. Large thunderstorm missed us by a couple of miles to the north an hour ago. We got a good view of the lightning and heard the thunder.

      4. Thank you, Maggie for a new word (to me) petrichor.

        Rained in Moffat for a while this morning, light, then heavier – now dripping occasionally.

          1. Unfortunately, Paul, I’ve split with Judy although she has been most helpful in facilitating this move.

            I am living in a flat at Dowding House in Moffat, Dumfries and Galloway, which is a RAFA (Royal Air Forces Association) sheltered accommodation. At 78, I need all the help I can get.

          2. 1-bed? Living room? Kitchen?
            I feel for you, Tom. I hope it turns out OK or better. At least you aren’t on the streets and the RAFA took you in. I’ll be making a donation based on taht, that they care about their own and do something practical to help.
            Take care, you hear?

          3. Thank you Paul, Just one bed, one sitting room, kitchen, hall, toilet with shower and plenty of cupboard space. RAFA, via RAFBF (Benevolent Fund) paid me £1500 to buy basic furniture and they paid for the transport from Suffolk to Dumfries and Galloway (another £795) so my earlier service (1960 to 1969) has proved a good investment now I’m 78.

            Since I think that the RAFBF is generally the paymaster, they will appreciate any donation you care to make. It will chuff them no end to know why you’re donating.

            Taking care. I’m now probably closer to you and Grizzly than many other NoTTLers.

          4. Excellent… read that as “… hall toilet”, and thought “isn’t that poor design?”… maybe a trip to Specsavers should be programmed in.
            Looks quite respectable, glad you have practical help when it’s needed. Good on the RAFBF and RAFA. It’s unusual to hear of anybody doing anything actually useful to cure problems.

  52. The radar shows rain over most of Dorset. I have just walked the dog in the forest. Bone dry. The clouds are quite high and until they are saturated they will not release any rain.

  53. Sounds rather like thunder here in N Essex. Sky dull and threatening but no precipitation as yet. Much cooler and comfortable today so thanks for small mercies even if it remains dry.

    Edit. Large spots of a wet looking substance are falling on my patio and a few made it to the patio doors. 14:43 – That is all.
    Edit 2. Patio has small puddles in the uneven surface of the sandstone slabs. 15:00 – That is all.

  54. It’s good to know that Wee Krankie has her priorities in the correct order…

    Nicola Sturgeon mulls green crackdown for Scottish malt

    Green MSP welcomes review into possible environmental harms of whisky maturation process

    Nicola Sturgeon could embark on a new green crackdown of Scotland’s whisky industry, over fears that emissions from the “angel’s share” of casks is harming the environment and human health. Every year, around two per cent of whisky, the so-called “angel’s share” because it evaporates during the maturation process, is lost during its production.

    But SNP and Green ministers are concerned that the emissions could be having a detrimental impact on the environment and health, and want to find out whether action should be taken to reduce the damage. It is funding a review of the harm caused by the non-methane volatile organic compounds (NMVOC) that arise from malt whisky maturation, which have surged over recent years due to the rising international popularity of Scotland’s national drink.

    Researchers have been asked to suggest possible “mitigation strategies” for “controlling” whisky-related emissions, leading to a backlash from the industry.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/14/nicola-sturgeon-mulls-green-crackdown-scottish-malt/

    1. The solution is obvious. Zero alcohol whisky No loss from evaporation at all. And no drink driving issues, a useful secondary effect.

    2. The very, very best mitigation policy for the Scotch industry and Scotland as a whole would be to dump Sturgeon. How much more obtuse does this woman need to become before action is taken to remove her?

    3. Someone pointed out last night that Scotland have two great exports – oil and whisky. Nikeliar has closed down the oil exploration and seems determined to cripple whisky distilling! She really is a clueless, joyless moron!

  56. OLD TRAFFORD DONKEY SANCTUARY (Est. 2013.)

    From as little as £750 a year, you too can sponsor a helpless donkey.
    Like HARRY bought from Leicester for £80m, where his cruel Thai owners
    were forcing him to perform as a ‘footballer’ for as much as 90 minutes
    in the blazing sun, in front of a baying crowd. Or CRISTIANO, brought
    here at enormous expense because no one else wanted him. No one knows
    exactly how old Cristiano is, but he’s certainly a veteran as he can
    scarcely move and is useless for any work. His food, vet bills and
    treats cost us over 500k a week. Or perhaps little LUKE or ‘Fatty’ as he
    is known to his fans. Luke has had such traumas that he’s a compulsive
    eater, and often eats as many as 10 large sacks of carrots a day.

    Of course, you don’t need to choose Harry, Cristiano or Luke. We have
    more than a dozen other donkeys some of them tragic cases. For example
    PHIL. Little Phil would have been put down anywhere else, as his vet
    bills are huge and he is rarely able to do any work. However, here at
    Old Trafford he is safe and can enjoy retirement with his friends.

    We are open on alternate weekends and many Thursday nights. Why don’t
    you come down and enjoy the sight of our donkeys running aimlessly about
    our large field in Trafford, near Manchester? We have several cafes and
    a big shop where you can buy an expansive range of donkey memorabilia.
    Remember, every penny goes towards the upkeep of our donkeys and enables
    us to bring in more hapless donkeys from around the world to our safe
    retirement home.

    (Old Trafford Donkey Sanctuary, Registered Charity 16161616.)

    Patron: Mr J. Glazer. Temporary Donkey Superintendent Mr E. ten Hag.
    Donkey Superintendent Emeritus, Sir Alex Ferguson.

    Corporate Sponsors: FA Premier League, PGMOL, BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian,
    Mr Kok’s Crispy Noodle Stall (Bangkok).

  57. two blokes, pete and nobby go into a bakery, nobby pinches three iced buns and shoves them in his pockets .
    Pete says to nobby “that’s just simple theft I will show you how it’s done”.
    pete convinces the baker to let him show him a magic trick .
    The baker places 3 iced buns on the counter and pete eats each one in turn ..the baker looks annoyed and want’s his money,
    .pete says” no it’s magic, look in nobby’s pockets!”

    1. If our government carry on like this they will deserve to be hanged.

      It is obvious to any sentient being that the jabs do not work as described, are incredibly dangerous with mounting ‘vaccine’ casualties, are mightily expensive profiting shyster politicos, their old mates from Eton and Oxford (that is you Dido Harding) and endow the riches of Croesus on international Pharma whilst bankrupting the rest of us.

      If these cretins seriously believe that millions will submit to more of the same they are on another planet. The game is up and I frankly have little sympathy left for any fool taking these jabs.

    2. If our government carry on like this they will deserve to be hanged.

      It is obvious to any sentient being that the jabs do not work as described, are incredibly dangerous with mounting ‘vaccine’ casualties, are mightily expensive profiting shyster politicos, their old mates from Eton and Oxford (that is you Dido Harding) and endow the riches of Croesus on international Pharma whilst bankrupting the rest of us.

      If these cretins seriously believe that millions will submit to more of the same they are on another planet. The game is up and I frankly have little sympathy left for any fool taking these jabs.

  59. Thanks for all the good wishes for my birthday yesterday from y’all. It was a busy day but very enjoyable.

    2. Sorry for having been a day early, Happy that you had a happy day – now look forward to 364 Happy Unbirthdays.

  60. This is a long piece, more than 2,500 words. Here are just a few extracts.

    Peddlers of environmental doom have shown their true totalitarian colours

    Corporations and utopians are offering authoritarian solutions to crises only democracy and free markets can solve

    JORDAN PETERSON

    In May this year, Deloitte released a clarion call to precipitous action trumpeting the climate emergency confronting us. Called ‘The Turning Point: A Global Summary’, it is a stellar example of a mentality more common among officials in the EU: one of fundamental bureaucratic overreach (and one which generated Brexit – a very good decision on the part of the Brits, in my view) that threatens the very survival of that selfsame EU.

    The report opens with two claims: first, that the storms, wildfires, droughts, downpours, and floods around the globe in the last 18 months are unique and unprecedented – a dubious claim – and implicitly that the “science” is now at a point where we can say without doubt that experts can and must bmodel the entire ecology and economy of the planet (!) and that we must modify everyone’s behaviour, by hook or by crook, to avoid what would otherwise be the most expensive environmental and social catastrophe in history.

    The Deloitte “models” posit that “climate impacts” could affect global economic output, and say that unchecked climate change will cost us $178 trillion over the next 50 years – that’s $25,000 per person, to put it in human terms.

    Ask yourself: are these Deloitte models – which are supposed to guide all the important decisions we make about the economic security and opportunity of families and the structures of our civil societies – accurate enough even to give those who employ them any edge whatsoever, say, in predicting the performance of a stock portfolio (one based on green energy, for example) over the upcoming years?

    The answer is no. How do we know? Because if such accurate models existed and were implemented by a company with Deloitte’s resources and reach, Deloitte would soon have all the money.

    That is never going to happen. The global economy, let alone the environment, is simply too complex to model.† It is for this reason, fundamentally, that we have and require a free-market system: the free market is the best model of the environment we can generate.

    (Peterson to the Peddlers of Doom):

    Quit demanding that the rest of us blindly follow your diktats. Quit demonising and castigating us, merely because we don’t just happily cede to you all the extant power. We’re not evil just because we don’t believe that you are omniscient. We’re not evil just because we don’t want you to assume omnipotence and omnipresence too.

    There is simply no pathway forward to the green and equitable utopia that necessitates the further impoverishment of the already poor, the compulsion of the working class, or the sacrifice of economic security and opportunity on the food, energy and housing front. There is simply no pathway forward to the global utopia you hypothetically value that is dependent on force. And even if there was, what gives you the right to enforce your demands? On other sovereign citizens, equal in value to you?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/15/peddlers-environmental-doom-have-shown-true-totalitarian-colours/

    † As we’ve been saying for years.

  61. This is a long piece, more than 2,500 words. Here are just a few extracts.

    Peddlers of environmental doom have shown their true totalitarian colours

    Corporations and utopians are offering authoritarian solutions to crises only democracy and free markets can solve

    JORDAN PETERSON

    In May this year, Deloitte released a clarion call to precipitous action trumpeting the climate emergency confronting us. Called ‘The Turning Point: A Global Summary’, it is a stellar example of a mentality more common among officials in the EU: one of fundamental bureaucratic overreach (and one which generated Brexit – a very good decision on the part of the Brits, in my view) that threatens the very survival of that selfsame EU.

    The report opens with two claims: first, that the storms, wildfires, droughts, downpours, and floods around the globe in the last 18 months are unique and unprecedented – a dubious claim – and implicitly that the “science” is now at a point where we can say without doubt that experts can and must bmodel the entire ecology and economy of the planet (!) and that we must modify everyone’s behaviour, by hook or by crook, to avoid what would otherwise be the most expensive environmental and social catastrophe in history.

    The Deloitte “models” posit that “climate impacts” could affect global economic output, and say that unchecked climate change will cost us $178 trillion over the next 50 years – that’s $25,000 per person, to put it in human terms.

    Ask yourself: are these Deloitte models – which are supposed to guide all the important decisions we make about the economic security and opportunity of families and the structures of our civil societies – accurate enough even to give those who employ them any edge whatsoever, say, in predicting the performance of a stock portfolio (one based on green energy, for example) over the upcoming years?

    The answer is no. How do we know? Because if such accurate models existed and were implemented by a company with Deloitte’s resources and reach, Deloitte would soon have all the money.

    That is never going to happen. The global economy, let alone the environment, is simply too complex to model.† It is for this reason, fundamentally, that we have and require a free-market system: the free market is the best model of the environment we can generate.

    (Peterson to the Peddlers of Doom):

    Quit demanding that the rest of us blindly follow your diktats. Quit demonising and castigating us, merely because we don’t just happily cede to you all the extant power. We’re not evil just because we don’t believe that you are omniscient. We’re not evil just because we don’t want you to assume omnipotence and omnipresence too.

    There is simply no pathway forward to the green and equitable utopia that necessitates the further impoverishment of the already poor, the compulsion of the working class, or the sacrifice of economic security and opportunity on the food, energy and housing front. There is simply no pathway forward to the global utopia you hypothetically value that is dependent on force. And even if there was, what gives you the right to enforce your demands? On other sovereign citizens, equal in value to you?

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/15/peddlers-environmental-doom-have-shown-true-totalitarian-colours/

    † As we’ve been saying for years.

  63. Over-Eating and Lack of Exercise During Lockdown Has Triggered Huge Increase in Gout

    Is this another cover-up for the “vaccine’s” side effects? Close to a quarter of a million cases since the jabbing commenced. A friend of mine had the two AZ jabs and hey-presto! a few weeks later I had to rush her to the hospital to have her badly swollen left foot looked at. It was so painful that she couldn’t walk. Diagnosis? Gout, have some anti-biotics and pills to alleviate the pain. Along with suffering fatigue and the appearing/disappearing red spots on her arms and hands she’s fine and dandy but ruing the day she took the AZ.

    Daily Sceptic – Over-Eating and Lack of Exercise During Lockdown Has Triggered Huge Increase in Gout

        1. Gout is a form of arthritis. I take allopurinol for it, like Rastus does, and eat a low-purine diet. No problems since.

          1. The type I have is heavy on the arthritis, and is getting worse. The gouty bit I guess is because of its location. I’m
            on allopurinol which might be helping.

      2. Wiktionary

        French gout (uncountable)

        (archaic, slang) syphilis
        Synonym: French pox

        **************************************

        You’ll need something something more potent than your beret basque to cure that

    2. I got a bad attack of gout many years ago but now I take Allopurinol alongside my blood thinners and the gout is well under control

    3. Tell me about it! Red spots have gone but both my feet are very swollen. And a new development…a sore red patch on my left foot.
      The only doc who paid attention was the last one I saw and he’s a trainee so will likely be ignored.
      I usually need my husband’s arm if we are out and about which is very frustrating for me.

  64. Little par 4

    Wordle 422 4/6

    ⬜🟩⬜⬜🟨
    ⬜🟩⬜🟩⬜
    🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩
    🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    1. Same here.
      Wordle 422 4/6

      ⬜🟨⬜⬜⬜
      ⬜🟨⬜⬜🟨
      🟩🟩⬜🟩🟩
      🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

      1. Bogey Five for me …
        Wordle 422 5/6

        ⬜⬜⬜🟨🟨
        ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
        ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
        ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
        🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

        1. Me too.
          Wordle 422 5/6

          🟨⬜⬜🟩🟩
          ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
          ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
          ⬜🟩⬜🟩🟩
          🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

    7. 355118+ up ticks,

      Afternoon AP,
      Then they must be told they have served their time as prisoners and are leaving on the 16 /8/2022 for freedom in Rwanda along with their British political colleagues, 650 in number .

    9. Treated like prisoners? So they should be – they are illegal gimmegrunts – put ’em in camps on one of the uninhabited Scottish Islands, surrounded by barbed wire.

    3. No, you’re not speaking German; but your children and your grandchildren will have Arabic as their first language.

      1. Indeed – and had yer Chermans conquered us – none of the scum shown in the clip would be here….

          2. When the Nazis came for the communists,
            I remained silent;
            I was not a communist.

            When they locked up the social democrats,
            I remained silent;
            I was not a social democrat.

            When they came for the trade unionists,
            I did not speak out;
            I was not a trade unionist.

            When they came for the Jews,
            I remained silent;
            I was not a Jew.

            When they came for me,
            there was no one left to speak out.

  67. The end of my rant … for today

    https://twitter.com/lincs67/status/1558886571884982272

    Joe 💎
    @lincs67
    Replying to
    @pritipatel
    and
    @ukhomeoffice
    Your lack of actions has turned so many towns , cities , seaside resorts into no go area for young girls . As a woman you should feel ashamed you have failed miserably to stop the invasion in this country .there is no excuse , scared to offend the french is not acceptable reason

    1. 355118+ up ticks,

      Afternoon Joe,

      The majority vote supports the likes of
      pretty awful patel & party not once or twice but again,again,& again.

      2. I work with a Pakistani muslim. He’s not really practicing. Prior to that I’ve worked with the kindest, gentlest fellow, also a Pakistani Muslim.

        I’ve made jokes about ‘his Mamma’ and argued many times that his faith is a pile of nonsense. In each occasion he said ‘Might be, but it’s mine, and has helped me through’. Now, both those chaps are hard working, high earning, kind and generous people.

        Therefore everyone’s different. Why then do we have such a problem in the Pakistani Muslim community?

        1. That is all to do with the ghastly imperialist, colonising, enslaving British, doncha know?

  69. Apols again …

    Boris Johnson received replies
    Boris Johnson
    @BorisJohnson
    ·
    Aug 14

    United Kingdom government official
    Level 1:
    A very happy 75th Independence Day to the people of Pakistan.

    In 75 years our people have forged close ties, with 1.6 million people of Pakistani heritage calling the UK home. I look forward to seeing our relationship strengthen yet further in the years ahead!
    Lesley Reed
    @yelseldusty
    ·
    Aug 14
    Level 2:
    Don’t agree, Pakistani culture has done unbelievable damage to our society and western values. Your tweet is utter nonsense. ….grooming gangs, sharia law, FSM, forced marriages, electoral fraud, anti free speech, Batley teacher, multiple wives….a disaster.
    Betty Jackson
    @BettyJa08291909
    ·
    17h
    Level 2:
    Stop this claptrap. We all know the reality of immigration from Pakistan and what it has done to our formerly civilised country.

    1. 1.6 million? Try 16 million. And they’ve not come here to live and work, either. Many do, but the majority don’t – and that’s sad.

      1. Time for some severe repatriation and if they won’t go ice willingly, then law changes are needed to ensure our Christian way of life continues.

        To be elected to any authoritive office, you must be British by birth, back to your Father and Grandfather and profess to a Christian way of life. Double-dealing will mean instant deportation and that will include ALL family members.

    2. They’ve got to pander to an audience, and that audience is usually young children. Heck, Junior’s bonkers about Dinosaurs. Draws them continually, talks about them – ‘Did you know some had three brains? Imagine that? Three brains! Mummy says you don’t have one, Dad!’

      It’s footfall, and the more folk are walking around these beautiful buildings and contributing to their upkeep and learning about their heritage, the better.

      Although there may still be some confusion that God is not actually a T Rex.

    3. As a boy and living just 15 miles south of Norwich, my brother and I were regular visitors either on bikes, hitch-hiking or, if affordable, on the omnibus.

      That view that Marcus has published is not familiar to me but at least 68 years have passed, and they probably don’t allow access through Tombland.

      We used to attend the carol service every Christmas and in between I went to the Wrestling in the Cornhall, Jazz at both The Bedford Arms and Studio 4, dancing at the Samson and Hercules Ballroom and Speedway at the Firs.

      If this evokes memories for others, I’m happy so to do.

    1. By now you’d only have the bones left – unless it was a recent one. Far better to get in on the planning committee and bury a body in concrete *used* to build a reservoir.

        2. One of our local gangsters is in the piling of the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow! His son and daughter in law both committed suicide in prison, and one of their sons was run over when he was lying drunk in the road, after a bottle of Buckfast. He was 13.

          8. They make greetings cards! Well, some of them do – the others definitely kill people!

          12. Not as far as the local gossip is aware! They died on the same day, in different prisons!

      1. “White horse” – No such thing, Uncle Bill:

        ‘A white horse is actually grey – it’s a colouration that occurs when a gene causes the hair coat to gradually lose its colour. A horse may be born chestnut, black, or even palomino, but if its genetic makeup has a dominant grey gene, the coat will change over the years, turning dark grey when the horse is six to 12 months old and often pure “white” by the age of six.’

        1. Rubbish. We have numerous white horses littering the landscape around here, all over six years old and very white. It’s just that they are not very mobile.

          https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/88badd5838451afd212a2cfc2becdd92d093442f2f80dfb921d96290596fd0ff.jpg
          https://assets.horsenation.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Aerial_view_from_Paramotor_of_Uffington_White_Horse_-_geograph.org_.uk_-_305467-640×480.jpg

          https://www.wiltshiremuseum.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/WH-tea-towel_full-300×300.jpg

          1. Nay decent malt whisky would succumb to such bland imagery; think of proud highland names like ‘Bruachlarrick’ and ‘Lagavulin’ …

          2. If those are the smokey Island Malts, I’ll stick with the Speyside thank you. Clean and clear.

          4. Lagavulin & Laphroaig are both peated Islay malts, as is Bruichladdich! There are others on the island too!

            “Islay whisky is usually associated with peaty single malt whisky. The three powerhouse distilleries on its south coast, which have become world-famous, produce some exceptional peaty single malt whiskies. Ardbeg, Laphroaig and Lagavulin all enjoy a sort of cult status.
            There are also some less peaty drams. Take Bunnahabhain. This Islay distillery sits to the north of the island and produces fruitier single malts. There’s also the Bruichladdich distillery known for their experimental stance when producing single malt, Bowmore in Islay’s pretty administrative capital, Caol Ila and the newer farm-distillery of Kilchoman, both of which are usually peated, but not to the same level as the three mentioned at the top.”

          5. I like all of the above apart from Ardbeg, that’s probably only because I once had a bottle that when opened didn’t smell right. The taste was not nice, like a very cheap blend, whch is probably exactly what it was.
            Counterfeit? got it duty free so unable to go back to the shop, sent details to the distillery – no reply.
            Not purchased it since.

          6. Bunnahabhain is my favourite, but Speysides are excellent, too. Depends on your mood and how peaty/dry you want your whisky.

          7. The thing I love about malts is that what tastes perfect today might not tomorrow, it’s a constant quest for perfection!

          8. Lagavulin & Laphroaig are both peated Islay malts, as is Bruichladdich! There are others on the island too!

            “Islay whisky is usually associated with peaty single malt whisky. The three powerhouse distilleries on its south coast, which have become world-famous, produce some exceptional peaty single malt whiskies. Ardbeg, Laphroaig and Lagavulin all enjoy a sort of cult status.
            There are also some less peaty drams. Take Bunnahabhain. This Islay distillery sits to the north of the island and produces fruitier single malts. There’s also the Bruichladdich distillery known for their experimental stance when producing single malt, Bowmore in Islay’s pretty administrative capital, Caol Ila and the newer farm-distillery of Kilchoman, both of which are usually peated, but not to the same level as the three mentioned at the top.”

          9. Lagavulin & Laphroaig are both peated Islay malts, as is Bruichladdich! There are others on the island too!

            “Islay whisky is usually associated with peaty single malt whisky. The three powerhouse distilleries on its south coast, which have become world-famous, produce some exceptional peaty single malt whiskies. Ardbeg, Laphroaig and Lagavulin all enjoy a sort of cult status.
            There are also some less peaty drams. Take Bunnahabhain. This Islay distillery sits to the north of the island and produces fruitier single malts. There’s also the Bruichladdich distillery known for their experimental stance when producing single malt, Bowmore in Islay’s pretty administrative capital, Caol Ila and the newer farm-distillery of Kilchoman, both of which are usually peated, but not to the same level as the three mentioned at the top.”

          10. I’m not opposed to it’s strange make up, it tastes good but, has a similar aroma to Swarfega.

          12. Bruichladdich [“Brook-Laddie”] and Bunnahabhain [“Boon-a-har-ven”] are my two favourite Islay malts.

      1. This lot look OK, thank goodness. Shiny coats; the picture of health. Lots of foals. Just wonderful.

      1. It’s rather intriguing; I shall ask as I prowl around. Just stepped aside to let one trot along the pavement in the village!

      1. They are far sleeker and less stubby than I was expecting. Many around 14 hands. I stepped off fhe pavement in the village yesterday to let a particularly fine example trot along his chosen path.

    1. If one encourages and facilitates import of savages, one must expect murder, rape and pillage – in no particular order …

    2. The altercation leading to the murder in Poland Street was among Korean restaurant staff.

      The restaurant was the first Korean restaurant to open in London and we visited it circa 1978 having both worked in Soho, I worked in Richmond Buildings and my wife in adjacent Dean Street. I remember the Korean food was good and meats grilled at the table.

      I have no desire whatever to revisit the place.

    3. Well done Sadiq Khan and the Met., you’ve really got a handle on the violence. Only 4 murders in three days (that we know about).

      Get a bloody grip of your little fiefdom.

  75. That’s me for this infuriating day of promised rain that never arrived. THEY say it will rain tomorrow and Wed. Huh!

    Have a jolly evening knitting lifebelts for the Channel hoppers.

    A demain.

  76. This is a long – but interesting – Spekkie article. This is Part 1.

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/partition-wasn-t-inevitable

    Partition wasn’t inevitable

    ‘Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially.’ Imagine if those famous words had not been spoken by Jawaharlal Nehru 75 years ago today, as Pakistan and India announced their independence, but instead by a confederation of the whole Indian subcontinent.

    In this counterfactual, imagine this new united state as an independent dominion, like Canada and Aus­tralia, with the British monarch as king-emperor. It has a weak central government and strong, autonomous provinces like undivided Punjab and Bengal. Its constitution is based on the British government’s Cabinet Mission Plan of 1945, accepted by both the predominantly Hindu Congress and the separatist Muslim League.

    To persuade Mohammed Ali Jinnah of the Muslim League, already dying of tuberculosis, to abandon his largely tactical demand for Pakistan, Mahatma Gandhi has given him the premiership of a coalition government at the centre. Nehru, whose arrogance and insistence on the top job had alienated Jinnah, has been slapped down in a realignment of the Congress leadership: Gandhi joining forces with anti-Nehru conservatives like Sardar Patel and Chakravarty Rajagopalachari (Rajaji). Nehru had been collaborating closely with Lord ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, sent as viceroy by the new Labour government to ‘cut and run’ as quickly as possible. But the Nehru-Mountbatten axis is seriously discredited by a scandal about Nehru’s affair with Lady Moun­tbatten, including insinuations that the bisexual ‘Dickie’ was a willing participant in a menage a trois.

    Mountbatten is packed off home in disgrace, while his perspicacious predecessor, Lord Wavell, returns as viceroy, resuming negotiations for a more gradual transfer of power to a united subcontinent. This slowly results in a new national unity coalition between Jinnah and the Congress conservatives. With Jinnah as his Muslim prime minister, Rajaji, a Hindu Brahmin, in due course succeeds Wavell as the first Indian governor-general of the newly independent dominion.

    Hindu-Muslim tension, ratcheted up by the Pakistan demand and the Congress opposition to it, now subsides. Prime Minister Jinnah’s main powerbase, the influential Muslim minority of India’s central Hindi belt, is delighted with the new power-sharing deal. For them, Pakistan was always a tactical rather than a practical demand, because it would uproot them from their homes in a partitioned India. The two largest Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab are equally pleased, because they remain undivided with powerful, devolved governments of their own. A year later, Jinnah dies, and his successors as leaders of the Muslim League, lacking either his charisma or ambition, accept the role of second fiddle to the Congress. Gandhi’s gamble has paid off, and he lives happily on for another decade, instead of falling victim to a fanatical Hindu assassin.

    Is this just a far-fetched, counterfactual scenario born of nostalgia and wishful thinking? Or could it have become a reality if the partnership of Clement Attlee, Lord Mountbatten and Nehru hadn’t rushed through a premature transfer of power to satisfy their own personal and ideological ambitions? The historical evidence suggests that there was no inevitability about Partition and that the key decisions were rather finely balanced.

    It’s something of a myth that Indian independence was won by direct action and that Partition was the inevitable price exacted by a colonial power determined to divide and rule. Effective independence was implicit in the constitutional reforms of the Raj in 1909 and 1919, well before Gandhi launched his civil disobedience movement. The Congress was knocking at an open door: the real point at issue was how to introduce parliamentary democracy in a subcontinent so diverse and largely illiterate.

    The central problem with elected legislatures was to safeguard the interests of the Muslim minority, still rooted in its feudal past and fearful of domination by the more successful Hindu business and professional elites. The solution accepted by a reluctant Congress was to have separate electorates for additional, reserved Muslim seats. What had still to be resolved was how to guarantee Muslim representation in newly devolved governments in the provinces and eventually at the centre.

    Matters came to a head with the new 1935 constitution, under which provincial elections were held on a greatly expanded franchise. In the United Provinces, the largest province, the Congress swept to power, in alliance with the Muslim League against the loyalist landlords’ party. The logical outcome was a Congress-League coalition government, but Nehru turned down the League’s coalition offer and the Congress formed a majoritarian government on its own, leaving the League in opposition. This was precisely the scenario that Muslims dreaded at the national level, if independence were to mean majority rule.

    Both Attlee’s deadline, and his choice of Mountbatten to implement it, proved disastrous

    The United Provinces fiasco was a turning point in the radicalisation of the Muslim League and its very moderate, secular-minded leader, Jinnah. It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely founder of a theocratic Islamic state than this whisky-drinking, pork-eating barrister, with his London education and his immaculate suits, his love marriage to a glamorous Parsi socialite, and his disregard for Islamic rules. Way back in 1916, when the Congress and the Muslim League agreed on an anti-British pact, Jinnah, as its chief architect, was hailed as ‘the ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’.

    What turned this patriotic, pro-Congress Muslim into the sectarian separatist of the 1940s? Two of his recent biographers, Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani-American academic, and Jaswant Singh, a former foreign minister of India, have converged on the same answer: the arrogance and intransigence of Congress leaders – Nehru in particular – and the pro-Nehru bias of the last viceroy, Lord Mountbatten. ‘Partition was the last thing Jinnah wanted,’ says Jalal, and she agrees with Jaswant Singh that his demand for it was essentially a bargaining ploy.

    Jawaharlal Nehru, Hastings Ismay (adviser to Mountbatten), Louis Mountbatten and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (photo: Getty)

    A vague 1940 Muslim League resolution adopting the goal of Pakistan left wide open whether it would be a single or multiple entity, a sovereign state or an autonomous state within a state. Jalal emphasises that Jinnah’s two-nation theory was not a territorial concept, but a demand for parity between Hindus and Muslims. Most Muslims, after all, were minorities in Hindu-majority provinces, while the Muslim-majority provinces depended heavily on the commercial and professional skills of prosperous Hindu minorities.

    Gandhi’s Quit India movement of 1942 proved a spectacular own-goal for the Congress party, because it landed most of its leaders and active cadres in jail for the rest of the second world war, while Jinnah filled the political vacuum, dramatically expanding his power base across India’s diverse Muslim communities. At the end of the war, constitutional negotiations resumed under the viceroy Field Marshal Lord Wavell, a remarkable soldier-statesman with long Indian experience appointed by Churchill. His objective was to transfer power to a united India and for Britain to stay long enough to broker a workable settlement. But for the new Labour government headed by Attlee, the priority was a rapid exit, winding up an expensive empire that had long ceased to pay for its keep. Attlee sent out the Cabinet Mission, which did its best to reconcile the Congress goal of a majoritarian, unitary state with the Muslim League demand for effective safeguards and full autonomy for Muslim-majority provinces. The outcome was an ingenious three-tier scheme in which sovereignty would be shared in a pyramid, with the provinces at its base, groups of provinces with either Hindu or Muslim majorities above them, and at the apex, an all-India centre for defence and foreign affairs.

    This would have been a unique constitutional experiment, more akin to the present European Union than a nation-state, but well suited to India’s political diversity. Both the Congress and the League reluctantly accepted the plan, but then fell out over its interpretation.

    ‘What the Cabinet Mission intended and the way we interpret what they intended may not necessarily be the same,’ Gandhi told the viceroy.

    ‘This is lawyer’s talk,’ said an exasperated viceroy Wavell. ‘Talk to me in plain English. I am a simple soldier. You confuse me with these legalistic arguments.’

    To this, Nehru quipped, ‘We cannot help it if we are lawyers.’

    The coup de grace for the Cabinet Mission Plan was delivered by Nehru in July 1946, when he publicly announced that a new constituent assembly, which would obviously have a large Hindu majority, would modify the Plan as it pleased. The Muslim League promptly seized on this to back out as well, reiterating its demand for a separate Pakistan and launching ‘direct action’ to achieve it.

    Two of Nehru’s closest colleagues have laid the blame for this breakdown squarely at his door. Maulana Azad called Nehru’s statement ‘one of those unfortunate events which changed the course of history’, lamenting the fact that ‘he is at times apt to be carried away by his feelings’. Sardar Patel, too, criticised Nehru for acting ‘with childlike innocence, which puts us all in great difficulties quite unexpectedly.’

    Nehru himself maintained that he had acted out of the conviction that partition was preferable to a loose federation. He wanted to be master in his own house, free to implement his socialist policies through centralised economic planning; and the Muslim League, in control of large, autonomous provinces, would have been an unwelcome brake on all this. Most important of all was Nehru’s visceral hatred of Jinnah, recorded with brutal candour in his diaries: ‘Jinnah…offers an obvious example of an utter lack of the civilised mind. With all his cleverness and ability, he produces an impression on me of utter ignorance and lack of understanding…. Instinctively I think it is better to [have] Pakistan or almost anything, if only to keep Jinnah far away and not allow his muddled and arrogant head from interfering continually in India’s progress.’

    Wavell, who was trying to bring both sides back to the negotiating table, lamented in his diary early in 1947: ‘There is no statesmanship or generosity in the Congress.’ But Attlee decreed otherwise and summarily replaced Wavell with another, far more glamorous soldier-statesman. Earl Mountbatten of Burma came armed with the aura of his military victories, his royal lineage and his ‘progressive’ politics. In what Churchill called ‘a premature, hurried scuttle’, Attlee announced that, regardless of a political settlement, Britain would quit India by June 1948.

        1. You are so generous, AA, and BT is so very rude. Give him a good slap.

          BTL:

          An0nymousBosch • 3 hours ago
          A fascinating conjecture, but it strikes me as wishful thinking.

          The sectarian tensions between Hindus and Muslims were not conjured into life by Partition. A year before India’s independence, on “Direct Action Day” in 1946, Calcutta alone saw the slaughter of 4,000 people in communal rioting.

          The “British Umpire” had to some extent managed to freeze the animosity felt by Hindus towards the Muslim Mughal Empire and its treatment of India’s Hindu majority, but inflaming those passions was all too easy and viable for so many newspapers and agitators that imagining some EU-like solution is fanciful. Remember too that under the Muslim Nizam of Hyderabad, a force of brutal razakar volunteers were fighting from 1938 onwards to ensure that Hyderabad would be an independent Muslim state separate from India. There was never any peaceful EU-like solution to that crisis – Hyderabad’s independence was crushed by Indian invasion in 1948, at a cost of tens of thousands of lives. Had India been some weak Hindi-Muslim confederation, how would that have panned out? Perhaps Hyderabad would have remained independent. In which case, many other parts of India might have chosen the same path.

          As bloody as Partition was, there are good reasons to believe it forestalled much worse down the road.

          (And let’s take the musings of Jaswant Singh with a pinch of salt; the man’s a Hindu nationalist, from a tradition that has long questioned the independence of Pakistan, and which views Muslims as second-class citizens in India, at best.)

          Stanley • 2 hours ago
          It is historical fact that Muslims want their own state where ever they are, just look at China, Thailand, Philippines, Burma, Russia. In all of these places, they have have carrying out terrorist attacks to achieve their aims of a separate Muslim state for decades. Even the wars in the former Yugoslavia
          They will never settle as part of any united country, any hope of a united India is a myth.

    2. Flicking through ………..as you do,………and latterly come 2008, it sort of opens up the options on who might have blown Mrs Buttho to pieces in her car.

      The United Nations’ investigation of the incident revealed that, “Ms. Bhutto’s assassination could have been prevented if adequate security measures had been taken.”
      Same old story in naff places like that. They can’t get along with any one. That’s why they move to other countries to find they cant can’t along with anyone there either.

  77. And here is Part 2.

    Both Attlee’s deadline, and his choice of the man to implement it, proved disastrous. Mountbatten’s vanity was legendary. His chief concern on the eve of his departure for India was what he should wear on arrival. ‘They’re all a bit left wing, aren’t they?’ he asked one India expert. ‘Hadn’t I better land in ordinary day clothes?’ He was delighted to be told: ‘No, you are the last viceroy. You are a royal. You must wear your grandest uniform and all your decorations and be met in full panoply.’

    Three months after his arrival, Mountbatten suddenly announced that he was bringing forward the British departure to August 15, 1947, and transferring power to two successor states carved out of Hindu and Muslim majority areas. ‘The date I chose came out of the blue,’ he later boasted. ‘I chose it in reply to a question. I was determined to show I was master of the whole event.’ He was even more cavalier at a public reception on the eve of Partition, saying that the best way to teach a youngster to cycle was to take him to the top of a hill, put him on the seat and push him down the hill – by the time he reached the bottom, he’d have learnt to cycle.

    Rushing through Partition before the security forces were ready for it, Mountbatten made little attempt to explore the alternatives. In a meeting with the viceroy, Gandhi suggested that the existing interim government led by Nehru be dismissed and Jinnah invited to form a new one. ‘What would Mr Jinnah say to such a proposal?’ Mountbatten asked in surprise. The reply was: ‘If you tell him I’m the author, he will reply, “Wily Gandhi!”’ The viceroy made no attempt to follow up Gandhi’s wily offer, which might have changed the course of history by offering Jinnah an honourable retreat from Partition.

    A major reason for Mountbatten’s failure to conciliate Jinnah was his all too obvious intimacy with Nehru. Widely rumoured at the time, and now confirmed by the memoirs of his daughter, Mountbatten facilitated a love affair between his beautiful, wealthy and very independent wife and his handsome Congress premier. ‘She and Jawaharlal are so sweet together,’ he wrote to his elder daughter. ‘They really dote on each other. Pammy [his younger daughter] and I are doing everything we can to be tactful and helpful.’ While his daughter saw this as ‘a happy threesome’, the bazaar gossip was less charitable. There’s one account of a handful of love notes between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten reaching Jinnah, who chivalrously returned them.

    The most appropriate epitaph on the Raj was provided by the Punjabi official who declared: ‘You British believe in fair play. You have left India in the same condition of chaos as you found it.’ As for Nehru, he first crowed about the mangled Muslim state that emerged from the cutting up of Punjab and Bengal, saying, ‘The truncated Pakistan that remains will hardly be a gift worth having.’ But a year later, he said, ‘Perhaps we acted wrongly… The consequences of that partition have been so terrible that one is inclined to think that anything else would have been preferable… Ultimately, I have no doubt that India and Pakistan will come close together… some kind of federal link… There is no other way to peace. The alternative is… war.’ Even as he spoke, the two new states were already at war over Kashmir.

    For Jinnah, to get even a moth-eaten Pakistan was, as a leading imperial historian put it, ‘an amazing triumph, the outcome not of some ineluctable historic logic, but of the determination of a single individual.’ It is sobering to consider what might have happened if Mountbatten, instead of bringing forward the date, had delayed it. Jinnah, already in the final stages of tuberculosis, died 13 months after partition.

    The state he left behind was born to fail, and most Congress leaders expected that this malformed offspring would soon return, tail between its legs, to Mother India. It had virtually no industry, with the markets for its agricultural produce left behind in India; although it produced three-quarters of the world’s jute, the processing plants were all in India. The predominantly Hindu entrepreneurial classes had fled with their capital and expertise. The ruling elite of the Muslim League were mostly refugees from India and soon at odds with the predominantly Punjabi population they governed. The Bengali Muslims of East Pakistan had little in common with the western half, a thousand miles away.

    Little wonder that Pakistan fell prey to a series of corrupt and repressive military and civilian regimes and that its eastern wing, after another bloody war and an estimated 3 million casualties, broke away in 1971 to become Bangladesh. After the Soviet invasion of neighbouring Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan became the base for militant Islamists fighting the Russians, which further weakened its civil society and radicalised a younger generation that had already been incensed by India’s occupation of Muslim Kashmir.

    The counterfactual story would have been far more positive. Granted, a united Indian federation, based on the Cabinet Mission Plan, would have had its share of friction and tensions; but, over time, the glue of shared power might have held the Congress and the Muslim League together, at least on issues of external security. India, without Nehru’s pro-Soviet brand of non-alignment, would probably have allied with the West and, like the Raj, would have seen Afghanistan as a vital buffer state from which the Russians must be excluded. Under Indian protection, Afghanistan would have remained a benevolent, westernising monarchy with little scope for the Taliban.

    Without a hostile Pakistan on its borders, India would also have been far better able to check communist China’s ambitions. The Raj had seen an independent Tibet as a necessary buffer against Chinese expansionism. ‘Rather than see a Chinese occupation of Tibet’ a British general had warned in 1946, ‘India should be prepared to occupy the plateau herself.’ In 1959, a serious Indian ultimatum would probably have prevented China from occupying Tibet and ending its autonomy under the Dalai Lama. If so, India would have been spared military defeat in the disastrous 1962 Sino-Indian War, for which the Nehru government was so patently ill prepared.

    A decentralised union of sovereign provinces would not have been any less efficient or productive than today’s India, with its strong regional parties. Over time, the Hindu-Muslim religious divide would perhaps have faded, given the myriad ethnic, regional and linguistic identities that make up the Indian mosaic. The union would also have been cemented by rapid growth, as a dynamic private sector, unshackled by Nehru’s state socialism, outstripped the mini-tiger economies. Yes, a united subcontinent could have entered the 21st century as the world’s second largest economy, well ahead of China.

    1. Written by a clever author, but ‘what if’ stories always fail to convince.
      I had to read most of the article before I found a weakness.

      1. I had to read most of the article before I found a weakness.

        Like this bit in the last paragraph?

        “Over time, the Hindu-Muslim religious divide would perhaps have faded, given the myriad ethnic, regional and linguistic identities that make up the Indian mosaic.”

  78. Well on covid progress. New pack of testing kits arrived today after much sneezing and coughing ( it stirs up such sensitive areas) still a feint line but give it another day or so and i’ll be out of the woods.

    1. Why did Caroline and I have Covid so very mildly when we are unjabbed and just took Vitamin D, Vitamin C and zinc tablets?

      2. I only had two jabs last year (2nd and the 5th 21) Richard they have caused me more than enough trouble.
        But i spoke to the surgery reception today as i had to cancel a blood test, i told her we had been to Cornwall and she said lots of people have reported to have caught covid in the west country over the holidays.

      4. Because you had the right medication that didn’t cost a fortune and real doctors knew would work.
        Unfortunately Big Pharma wouldn’t have made any money from it and there would not have been anything to fill large brown envelopes with.

  80. I feel drained now, although I’ve been asleep most of the afternoon. I can’t stop yawning it’s a terrible feeling.
    I’m not even hungry. Slayders.

  82. A man met a beautiful lady and decided he wanted to marry her right away.
    She said, ‘But we don’t know anything about each other.’
    He said, ‘That’s all right, we’ll learn about each other as we go along.’
    So she consented, they were married, and off they went on a honeymoon at a very nice resort.

    One morning they were lying by the pool, when he got up off of his towel, climbed up to the 10 metre board and did a two and a half tuck, followed by three rotations in the pike position, at which point he straightened out and cut the water like a knife.
    After a few more demonstrations, he came back and lay down on the towel.
    She said, ‘That was incredible!’
    He said, ‘I used to be an Olympic diving champion. You see, I told you we’d learn more about each other as we went along.’

    So she got up, jumped in the pool and started doing lengths.
    After seventy-five lengths she climbed out of the pool, lay down on her towel and was hardly out of breath.
    He said, ‘That was incredible! Were you an Olympic endurance swimmer?’
    ‘No,’ she said, ‘I was a prostitute in Liverpool but I worked both sides of the Mersey’…..

    1. Does that mean there’s hope for me yet as a gigolo?

      I swim that, twice a day, through the summer season!

  83. A man met a beautiful lady and decided he wanted to marry her right away.
    She said, ‘But we don’t know anything about each other.’
    He said, ‘That’s all right, we’ll learn about each other as we go along.’
    So she consented, they were married, and off they went on a honeymoon at a very nice resort.

    One morning they were lying by the pool, when he got up off of his towel, climbed up to the 10 metre board and did a two and a half tuck, followed by three rotations in the pike position, at which point he straightened out and cut the water like a knife.
    After a few more demonstrations, he came back and lay down on the towel.
    She said, ‘That was incredible!’
    He said, ‘I used to be an Olympic diving champion. You see, I told you we’d learn more about each other as we went along.’

    So she got up, jumped in the pool and started doing lengths.
    After seventy-five lengths she climbed out of the pool, lay down on her towel and was hardly out of breath.
    He said, ‘That was incredible! Were you an Olympic endurance swimmer?’
    ‘No,’ she said, ‘I was a prostitute in Liverpool but I worked both sides of the Mersey’…..

  84. Cripes; just been reminded of better days. We have been watching “The Man Who Would Be King”. A reminder of a brilliant story teller, the days when Blighty still had oomph and then, some 80 years later, a cinema industry that made cracking good films with real stars.
    An exceptionally poignant film to watch on the first anniversary of the re-established Satanic state that constitutes modern AfGaff.

    1. For my money? The best performances by Caine and Connery that I can recall. One of my favourite films

      1. Yes. They worked really well together.
        The menace in the last few scenes is just as disturbing on the 4th (?) viewing as when I first saw it.
        The mindless, destructive hysteria of the ignorant and backward. After the past 2 – 3 years, a bit too near the knuckle.

        1. The crowned head from the bag scene still makes me jump, even though I know it’s coming.

  85. OT

    Urgently, Great Britain needs a Prime Minister who can secure long term, affordable domestic energy supplies.

    And controlled immigration.

    Right now, I don’t see a single reliable candidate.

          1. Whhaaattt???

            Don’t thee thou me, ’til I thou’st thee.

            But given that you are kind to Plum, I’ll forgive you.

            How is she?

          3. Glad it’s going the right way… faster is better, hope she’s back and active soon.

          4. Thank you.
            I hope her recovery, even if slow, is complete and gives her protection in future.
            If you get the chance please pass on my very best wishes, she’s good fun on the blog and certainly missed.

          5. My warmest wishes also. I was thinking about her today and hoping she was doing better.

    4. Lots of thunder, lightning and rain. Slow start, steady build up, and just over an inch of rain. One can almost see the weeds greening up as one looks out over the garden wasteland.
      }:-((

  90. Thinking about it, and after reading a whole load of papers when clearing Mother’s house, there are a lot of unclear issues I’d love to ask my parents about:
    – Why did Mother change her surname to Father’s by deed poll before they were married?
    – What happened to Mother’s first husband, and marriage?
    – Why did Father’s first marriage fall apart?
    – What about Father’s military service? Why the Royal Fusiliers, not DLI or KOYLI – they were closer?
    – Why did Father get so cross with me, years ago, when I asked about one of the atom bomb researchers? He worked for the man… (Gluckauf)
    – How come Father went to Nigeria a second time, to start a University? His HR number was “3”
    – Why did they leave Nigeria finally? Was it concern for Mother’s Father? Or, just fed up of the uselessness?

    1. My sister in law has asked me to write down or record some of the stuff I remember about my brother…for her kids and now a wee grandchild. I will when I feel able.
      Trouble is, when you are young and the old ones rabbit on, you aren’t interested; but later when you do want to know- they’re all gone.

          1. I did, but I don’t care for adding up the years….I swear they pass faster than they used to!

          2. Because I prefer to reply to the individual rather than R&C’s initial reminder, I was waiting until you appeared yesterday, to wish you a happy birthday. And then the thunderstorms arrived so no internet.

            I hope that you had a wonderful day and that you continue to age as gracefully as the Potomac flows.

          3. Well, the Potomac is certainly flowing gracefully and slow, at the moment;-) But thank you for your good wishes, it is always good to spend time with family, especially the grandkids and dog!

          5. They certainly do, they come around ever more quickly. I hope you had a great day, jillthelass, and 🎵Happy Birthday🎶 for yesterday.

      2. Saw an ad many years ago for a lady would would interview relatives and assemble a biography… thought it would be a good idea, but did nowt. Now all the memories are gone, either because of death or dementia.
        What an idiot, eh? No history R us.

        1. Try copying the format of my autobiography, as I’ve just explained to Ann, earlier.

          And I know you’ve read it – thank you, belatedly, for the review.

          1. Fascinating, it was.
            Just wish I could write something interesting… (yawms and nods off…)

        2. Have you tried Ancestry.com at all? I have been able to find all kinds of stuff I didn’t know. They also have a lot of info for ex-military and governmental depts, might be worth looking into.

          1. Facts, yes, but no information on motivation, emotion and the like. Why did she/he divorce him/her?

          3. Divorces quite often made the papers. You might find something there. They are subscription sites though.

      3. I found, when writing my autobiography, that it was easiest to start with a list of all the addresses I had lived at since birth. An astonishing 42!

        Against each I inserted bullet points as reminders of what happened there.

        At the third pass, I started turning those bullet points into stories, as part of the narrative. Like you, Ann, there was no parental help, they’d all passed on.

        1. 42 !!! I have lived in four, excluding student years as these were not permanent addresses, and two of those totalled only three years.

          5. Bless you, Maggie, for caring.
            Yes, I’ve moved up here to Scotland and feel rather lonely, even though Dowding House is owned by RAFA (The Royal Air Forces Association) and there are several ex-RAF men here but there are the usual cliques, fallings-out and petty-jealousies, that arise, as a good few of them are Military Widows and haven’t actually served in the forces themselves. They lack the camaraderie we knew, having bunked together in various dormitory billets.

            It’s not that I’m a stranger to Scotland but I lived further north in Banff, Aberdeenshire and Irvine, Ayrshire.

            No, I like to share my life, preferably with a female companion.

            Hugs

          6. You will soon settle down . Do you play golf .. nice course there, and I expect there are many societies you could investigate .

            Don’t do anything daft like the mail order bride thing .. many older men fall into that trap .. as I have witnessed amongst a few of my veterans in the past , the group I organise .

            So many have also fallen onto bad luck times by picking up chancers on a cruise !

            Join a walking goup/ history group etc, and start to relax and enjoy life again.

          10. We have been 41 yrs in this house; my mum was 63 years in her home, where I lived for 23 years.

      4. That’s why I think it’s important to write down your own memories, as I am planning to do and as Tom has done, so that when I/you are gone and others want to ask questions at least there are things and events written down they can refer to.

        1. We always leave it too late, Paul. There are things I want to ask too, but the people who can answer are now gone. Perhaps it is intentional in life’s plan, that we do not know these answers.

    3. What happened to the relatives in Hartlepool, who borrowed money but never paid back? Kathy, or…
      Where is Mother’s mother’s death certificate? When actually did she die? What was her name, even?
      Why did no bastard tell me my Great-Aunt Hilda had died and there was a funeral, till well after? The closest I ever had to a granny, and she loved me – more than the rest of they buggers did.
      Why did she never have children of her own?

        1. There are several sites labelled Free BMD but the one you have posted is the original one – and very good, Highly recommended.

      2. I have long suspected that I have/had a half sibling in Scotland…a child of my mothers before she married my father. They married quite late post war, both in early to mid 30s.
        However, I am not going to pursue it…my late dearly loved uncle probably could have told a few tales but never did.

        1. It may be quite rewarding to discover unknown half-siblings. Maybe get in touch with ‘Long Lost Families‘ they seem to be quite sensitive about it.

          I knew three of mine by my Mother’s first marriage. There were another 3 by my Father’s first marriage but I never found them, despite rigourous searching.

          Now, I’m the last surving member of those 9 siblings and half-siblings and I may soon pop my clogs as well.

          3. Well, don’t pop ’em anytime soon because we’ll miss you! Don’t over do things and enjoy your new home.

      3. I would imagine that Great Aunt Hilda was one of millions of women who lost any potential mates in WWI.

        1. She was married to Uncle Allan, a dried stick of a humourless man, who was a school janitor – with cat flap and bicycle. Died quite early after I was born – one of those couples so different that you wonder why they even got married at all.
          Still, left her with a huse in Birstall. Can’t have been all dull.

      4. Why did my mother never tell me that her mother was the one that I had been told was her sister? Grandparents were really my great grandparents!

        Actually quite a easy answer to that one. Back in 1920, a unmarried pregnancy was quite shameful, the whole family covered if up and my mother only told us the truth a few months before she died

        1. I only learned of Mother’s brother, who died as a small child, by finding a photo of a glum small lad in a christening gown, and asking her, sone years ago. Nobody talked of the poor wee lad, he died as a small child, and was forgotten airbrushed out – deliberately. Poor wee Trevor.

        2. I only learned of Mother’s brother, who died as a small child, by finding a photo of a glum small lad in a christening gown, and asking her, sone years ago. Nobody talked of the poor wee lad, he died as a small child, and was forgotten airbrushed out – deliberately. Poor wee Trevor.

        3. I only learned of Mother’s brother, who died as a small child, by finding a photo of a glum small lad in a christening gown, and asking her, sone years ago. Nobody talked of the poor wee lad, he died as a small child, and was forgotten airbrushed out – deliberately. Poor wee Trevor.

        4. The woman i believed to be my grandmother on my father’s side was actually his mistress. My actual grandmother was living with them as her sister. When she died he took another mistress and the old mistress was relegated to their spare room. He had a child with his second mistress who was the same age as me. In effect my step aunt.

          I was never told about my grandfather on my mother’s side even though i asked about him.
          Some years later when a cousin did the family tree through ancestry.com all hell broke loose.
          Blazing rows and actual physical assaults.
          Some stones are best not to be turned over.

    5. This is really interesting – not in a nosey way, but the questions. I didn’t realise how unhappy my Dad was, nor how precious holidays were to him. I can’t ask him if he wanted to do something else – play Chess professionally, for example. I’d like to talk to him about Mother’s narcissism and explain that no, he is not to blame and never has been.

      I’d like to say I’ve chosen the kitchen cupboards and laminate for the revamp. I’d like to say I worried about the cost. I’d like him to know the Wiggy died in his sleep and loved him as much as me. I’d like to ask him to visit more often and tell mother to not come. I’d like to ask his favourite colour. His favourite car. What he liked doing. I’d lie to say sorry on my 18th birthday that I didn’t go to the pub with him. I didn’t realise how big a thing it was for him.

      And as I write this I find it’s not about my Dad, but about me. You deserved better than a selfish, stupid, angry son who only grew up some 9 years ago and before you could get to know him, you had died.

      1. That’s profound. Afraid I teared up on reading that.
        “You deserved better than a selfish, stupid, angry son ”
        Yup. #metoo. Add insensitive.

        1. Bloody annoying I can’t say it to him. Whenever I see a new Jack Reacher novel I think of Dad. He’d have liked the series on Amazon.

          Not sure it’s profound – just a realisation that it’s always too late when it matters most.

          1. It took years before I stopped thinking “I must ask Pa …”, or “Pa would enjoy this ..”. Mother was never the same, but Father was kickass, and smart with it. Son of a West Hartlepool mineworker, he rose to being Professor and Deputy Vice Chancellor in a Nigerian University, thatt he was key in setting up. Now that’s achievement.

        2. Yes. I was oblivious. Only later did I begin to understand. But by then it was too late.

      2. It’s complex. The effects of a narcissistic parent reverberate round the family in all sorts of ways.

    6. An Army coleague brought his parents out to Germay for a visit. His Dad was proudly wearing his blazer in the mess. It bore a Black Watch badge. He was from South Staffordshire but when he joined up during the war, many from his draft were sent to the Black Watch, as the Scottish batallion had been depleted earlier in the war. It may have been the same in tour father’s case.

    7. Some guesses:
      Your mother changed her name by deed poll because she was unable to obtain a divorce as her husband was missing or they could not afford the legal costs; having the same surname would have allowed your mater and pater to travel together without too many questions (hotel reservations, immigration, employers etc).
      The RF was a good regiment, and clearly your Dad was smarter than average.
      Eugen Glueckauf worked at Harwell after the war. His daughter Barbara B could still be alive, and would be about 84.
      https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rsbm.1984.0007
      The link is to a potted biography of Dr Glueckauf.
      Have you ever read ‘Travels In The White Man’s Grave’ by Donald MacIntosh?

  91. Folk remember Sunak’s post from yesterday? HIs thing in the Telegraph where he wittered on about insulation and windmills?

    I’ve had a thought: the whole thing was nonsense. Clear, blatant obvious to anyone nonsense. Now, Sunak is not an idiot. He is not completely stupid and thus knows that despite having some 30,000 MW of wind capacity, it provides barely 13% of our energy over a year. This information is common knowledge. It is also ruinously expensive.

    Yet he wrote an article espousing this complete nonsense.

    It has made me think that he has to. It’s a sort of ‘nail your colours to our flag’ moment. It was so clearly utter hogwash that I’m starting to think they get told to say this by some sort of backstage cabal in return for support – don’t do it and you don’t get the cash. Renege on it and we keep pointing to your public support for our tax payer cash grab.

    I may just be deeply cynical of the state machine, but I honestly cannot believe these fools think what they say, so why do they say it?

    1. “…wind capacity…provides barely 13% of our energy over a year.”

      It’s a third of that. Electricity provides about a quarter of all energy requirements; wind is half of that.

      1. Honestly I grabbed the stat off Watts up with that – which tries to be impartial. Aside from the pollution, the materiel waste, the massive subsidy required, the socialised costs and privatised profits, the slaughter of birds and bats, their utter inefficiency and unrelaibllilty I’ve nothing against windmills.

        Problem is, when someone says ‘wind was generating 80% of our energy yesterday’ often they can mean that it was.. but from 12am to 4am when no one needed it and now they sit idle.

        1. “…when someone says ‘wind was generating 80% of our energy yesterday’ often they can mean that it was…”

          Even this statement contains a basic error – electricity is not all energy (or power as some put it). They should be saying wind is providing x% of the demand for electricity at that moment.

        2. We were driving across Europe on a very still day a couple of weeks ago, and my daughter groaned every time we passed an idle windmill and I said “Look! That’ll show Putin!”

      2. Marjorie Taylor Green was eviscerated in the US press for her negative remarks about wind and solar power viz. Solar panels are ineffective at night and windmills stay silent and immoveable when there is no wind.

        Some greenie idiot remarked that MTG was stupid because solar panels remain effective at night and that in any event all the energy generated is capable of being stored in batteries. Any normal observer would appreciate that there is no sufficient battery capacity yet developed and that accordingly energy from both windmills and solar panels must be sent directly to the grid.

        As regards the preference of idiots for solar farms, these generally occupy vast tracts of formerly agricultural land, thus destroying the fertility and utility of the land for food production, require similar efforts to transfer energy to the grid as windmills, and have a very limited lifespan.

        Needless to say both windmills and solar panels present us all with major disposal issues. There is nothing whatever ‘green’ in the pursuance of this nonsense.

        1. Even people who accept the idea of man-made GW will be called ‘deniers’ for pointing out the uselessness of wind and solar.

    2. No, I think you’re probably right. He’s had The Conversation, as Jennifer Arcuri called it.
      Probably been told that he will lose due to some hideous personal secret being blown up in the national media if he doesn’t toe the line.
      It is said that his wife’s family’s company is contracted to write the vaxx passport apps, I don’t know if that’s true. Some IT company has written all the CBDC stuff too, bet that was billions.

  100. Record number of A-level pupils from affluent backgrounds set to miss out on university
    Students from areas rated ‘most advantaged’ by universities least likely to have an offer compared to disadvantaged pupils, data show
    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/08/15/record-number-a-level-pupils-affluent-backgrounds-set-miss-university/

    BTL

    And the BBC would rather have an English Women’s football team which was not all white even if this meant having a team which would not win the competition! And how about replacing the fastest black women in the 100 metres sprint relay team with a couple of slower white women?

    Meritocracy is all very well if it seriously wants those with merit to succeed whether in the academic field or on the football field or athletics track – the alternative is mediocrity.

    1. Mediocrity has managed to ruin our precious country…

      Mediocrity has been with us for more than half a century .

      Britain is not on the tip of her toes anymore .. no one is watching out for her, nor do they care .

    2. Don’t worry, it is just proof that universities stand for mediocrity and that you don’t need a degree to get on in life. You just wait and see, all the private school kids who missed out on the Oxbridge places will be more successful in life than the mediocrities who hoovered up the places.
      But the mediocrities will all end up on the public payroll.

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